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Starting fights with other users is known as "tusking".

Having a wildly popular toot get boosted all over the place is "going woolly".

A server going down for good is an "extinction event".

I think it's all very cute.

I tried to grunt in Mastodon and accidentally recompiled it.

It's open source. You can change this to say whatever you want if you're willing to run it yourself, or you can find a place that's changed it to something you think sounds better than "toot".

You could YIFF! on yiff.life, if you prefer. A lot of instances change the verb.

> Could it be that extinct mastodons grunted or growled instead of tooting?

We can presume Mastodons shared many characteristics with modern day Elephants, which from zoo anecdotes seem capable of grunting, growling, and (both types of) tooting, to communicate different things.

The mammoth on The Flintstones had a human voice.