Rochko said at the time he was unaware of the connotation. “Probably not a lot of people know this now, but Mastodon’s web app started out with ‘Publish’. In 2016, a famous YouTuber jokingly offered to support Mastodon’s Patreon forever if I changed the button to say ‘Toot’ instead. Needless to say, this was a really early, and not very informed decision. The first glimpse of attention and financial support. As a non-native speaker I had no idea there was another meaning,” Rochko said in a post last May.

Source: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/11/mastodon-has-officially-retired-the-toot-its-version-of-the-tweet/

The web interface also looks slightly different, matching the project’s current purple logo and color scheme, and changing the “Toot” button to “Publish.”