Did Someone Just Call You a Moot? Don't Worry, They Aren't Insulting You on the Low

Ah! Gen Z slang. It seems like we can never stay on top of all the new words popping up every day. Well, don't worry. If you can't seem to figure out what TikTok moots are, we have you covered.

Gen Z, but especially the upcoming Gen Alpha, use social media in a totally different way. It's engrained in who they are and they tend to put quite a lot of pressure on their followers which are used as a status symbol.

What you might be interested to know is that followers also dictate friendship. If you don't follow your friend back, even accidentally, it's not a good look. While they want to amass a lot of followers, they typically are very selective in who they follow.

So, that's where the word "moot" comes in. A "moot" is someone who you follow and who follows you back. It stems from the word "mutual," it's a mutual follow shortened into a sweet little word.

Now, not everyone who is your moot is your friend, really. Sometimes moots are just people you're willing to stay in touch with or, even more surprisingly, they could be people you don't even know.

Wait, but if they're picky about who they follow, why would it be someone they don't know? Well, in today's world, best friends aren't just in real life.

The new chronically online generation has adapted to making friends online. That whole "don't talk to strangers on the internet thing" — yeah, they've totally tossed that out the window and now it's normal to have internet friends. After all, we lived in a world where you couldn't even make friends in real life for a while.

So, your moot can just be someone you've met online. Sometimes, you may not even talk to your moot that much, but you post similar things and enjoy seeing their content on your feed and vice versa.

The safety net of having moots that you might not know is nice, too. Typically, if you're mutuals on a platform, then you have an open invite to chat in their DMs.

By the way, moots isn't only a TikTok thing. If you dive onto Twitter, then you'll see that people use the term there, too, especially in the fandom world.

Similarly to moot, "oomf" is also about your following. It stands for "one of my followers" or "one of my friends" depending on the context. Typically, the more "online" spaces like fandom will use it to indicate followers whereas casual internet users are more likely to use it to refer to friends.

Most people would say oomf if it's someone they don't follow back because, if they did, they would just say moot. However, sometimes, if you're trying to be really shady and vague, oomf casts quite a large net.

The terms are somewhat interchangeable, but it'll take a bit of practice online to make sure you don't seem too out of place when you want to fit in with some new lingo.