Twitter updated their TOS many years ago to prohibit anything that would let you migrate away seamlessly. You can't mix their posts in a feed with other services, and there are constraints on mirroring them. :(

I have a command-line script to "toot", and I run a cross-posting tool that crosses in each direction. So I "toot" from the command line and it appears on Twitter. Equally, if I tweet, it appears as a "toot".

It gives me a chance to see how things go. So far, I'm preferring Mastodon because I'm on a small instance with a very definite community feel, rather than the sprawling, undifferentiated mess that is "Twitter".

People know toot means fart, right?

That's very much regional slang. And I'm pretty sure people know it - software is full of immature, juvenile, and puerile jokes, references, and people. My approach is just to ignore the muffled giggles and treat it all with a straight face.

Oh yeah I get that, probably doesn't help people convert if you have to say you're tooting at people, it sounds ridiculous!

Different instances have different terms for things, some more sensible, some less so. On cybre.space you don't "toot", you "Ping!", and there's another instance where you "Awoo".

Yes, the terminology doesn't help, but used to be stupid to say that you would "tweet" something.

Tweet at least made sense in context, twitter is all bird branded and a single tweet is one message of many, just like a single bird tweet is one of many that make up bird songs/calls

Having different terminology per server seems even worse than having a unified word that makes out you're farting information at people. "Hey I'm going to awoo you the link" "you what?", where the second person is used to it being referred to as something else

This is the problem with Mastodon, et. al. They're too caught up in the window dressings.