Riot is now Element | Hacker News Reader

Riot is now Element

element.io

550 pointsJ_tt361 comments

No!!! Of all the names in the world why this. "Hey bro, let's chat on Element" ,not quite a ring to it.

The hardest problem in computer science strikes again!

Matrix,Riot and Libolm are epic projects, I wish them all the success but man, even Riot was a hard sell as a brand. I would seriously be dissapointed if it loses popularity over this. I don't think the project maintainers understand that their core users/fans are waiting for a product they can sell to friends,family and coworkers.

People who don't know tech rely on branding/brand reputation and word of mouth reputation to decide if they are intetested in even trying out a product to begin with.

Which of these is unlike the others?

1) Signal

2) Telegram

3) Element

4) Whatsapp

Hint: The theme is messaging and communication.

Tbh, I don't see any problems with the name? I like it.

Try googling "element", and then try googling "whatsapp". See the difference?

I get frustrated when brands, products, and even more so OSS software projects, choose names that have too many other meanings/brands associated with them because it can make it unnecessarily difficult to find relevant information using current search engine technology[0]. I've had situations where I've been clicking through pages and pages of results to find something relevant to what I'm looking for, even with more qualified searches.

You can critique WhatsApp for any number of reasons, if you're so inclined, but it's hard to argue that they didn't pick a good name. It's eminently searchable and doesn't spam results pages for unrelated/tangentially related topics.

[0] I find names like "Signal" irritating for the opposite reason. You're searching for information about the other meanings and yet much of what you get is brand "spam" results related to the messaging system. Great if that's what you're searching for, not if it isn't.

> See the difference?

Well obviously it doesn't come up because they only just changed the name! In general Google is pretty good at returning the correct result for ambiguous searches. E.g. try searching for "Signal". Every result is about the signal app for me.

> Every result is about the signal app for me.

Yeeeees. See my comment at the bottom of my original post. That's great if you're searching for the signal app, but rather annoying if you're not.

Google is generally good at returning correct results because they analyzed all users habits and can infer what one is looking for; it's up to the user to choose if it's worth the price to pay wrt privacy. As for Signal, it's pretty normal for search engines, whether they spy on users or not, to return the app, since in their algorithms an explicit name (Signal) always wins over a generic name (a signal), which imo is how a search engine should work. In due time, most searches for Element will eventually return the chat app. I'm not sure I will like the name by then though.

But the difference between Signal returning results for the messaging client and Element not returning results is just one of popularity and the fact that Element as a name is brand new. When signal was a nerdy thing used by few people it was not coming up highly in results either. Arguably Riot has more users than Signal did when it was called TextSecure, so Element is better placed to pick up as a name than Signal was.

Obviously Whatsapp had the advantage that its only competition in search results were typos and people mispelling whats up for comedic effect.

Try Googling Windows, Android, React, Java, Python, Ruby, Assembly, C(!)... it seems like things have worked out OK for all of them. IMO worries like this are overblown.

May I ask if you are a native english user and what country? Perhaps the branding works for EU markets?

Element has nothing to do with messaging. In my example,signal has something to do with communication(signaling),telegram is obvious, whatsapp is what you say when you talk to someone like 'hello'(what is up?). Element sounds like something I hear about in a chemistry class.

It also has to be catchy. At least Riot was catchy even if it made no sense. A brand name is not a mission stateme t, it's marketing material, full stop.

Most EU languages have the word element too, with the chemistry/physics meaning.

You can also use https://dittochat.org or https://fluffychat.im

Does "whatsapp" sound like messaging? or "Skype"? or "Slack"? or "IRC"?

WhatsApp sounds like "what's up" - it definitely suggests conversation

The other two are meaningless, but at least monosyllabic - "I'll Skype you," "I'll Slack you," "I'll ... Element you?"

I plan to use a phrase like 'lets connect on Element'.

Element is a much better name than Riot. Lot less of a hard sell to convert normies.

Yeah, I guess the polysyllable "hop on a Zoom call" has already entered the corporate lexicon, and "hop an an Element call" could just as easily displace it.

"I'll Riot you" is also a non-sequitur at best

Perhaps less confusing than Signalling someone :)

I’ll zoom you also sounds weird unless you know zoom is a telecommunication app, and it sounded weird until people started using it. “I’ll start an Element call with you” won’t sound weird after people start using it.

You shouldn't say that anyway, since the protocol is called Matrix

or kik or discord

Discord=argument=discussion

Discord may be starting to regret their own name as they finally move away from gamer-centric branding and start broadening their marketing.

I wouldn't use "discord" as synonym for "argument" more like "disagreement" ie. the argumentation phase is over.

IRC = internet relay chat

chat does sound like messaging

Skype sounds like a made up word. Nothing wrong with that.

Also (as far as I know) the term "IRC" wasn't created as a product name intended to represent the protocol/service to potential customers. It was just an abbreviated descriptor of what it was.

The point of having a made up name that has nothing to do with the thing it is about is that it makes defending a trademark easier.

Even a "Riot" is a kind of boisterous conversation - like a chat, but less commoditized and more populist

I'm not a native speaker, but I associate a riot with group violence, vandalism, looting, that kind of thing.

I am a native speaker, and I've heard "a riot" used to describe "a good time", but in isolation I'd definitely also picture the violent protest type of riot.

That said, this doesn't appear to to be a common usage in the US. Webster doesn't have this usage, Wiktionary describes it as obselete and pairs it more with excess than I would, (also they use fifteenth century examples), though Oxford has it.

I recently read a BBC article that contained the usage. Perhaps it is more common in British English.

This is politicized in the US.

Conservatives invariably describe liberal demonstrations as "riots," in order to insinuate exactly the type of things you're describing. In response, liberals

1. View the term as something of a badge of honor

2. Have in fact grown more supportive of "vandalism" and "looting," using one's attitude towards them as a sort of litmus test of the value one places on the cause relative to property rights

If you want to sell to a left-aligned US business[^1], I think they'll view the term favorably.

[^1] For example, my wife is an aspiring design professional, and the consultancies in this space, including ones explicitly targeting conservative clients are overwhelmingly left-leaning.

I am a native speaker (UK) and concur. My grandmother would always threaten to "read us the riot act" if we were in real trouble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Act

Whatsapp has caught on to the point of utter market dominance in places where most people speak very little to no English. Without being aware of "what's up", there's no connection to communication at all. Still worked out well for them.

There's no connection between Amazon's brand and what they do, and yet Amazon Inc doesn't seem to suffer, and I don't think Apache Kafka is self-explanatory to just about anyone. Or Sprite (the beverage), and who really gets the name Pepsi? What meaning does Facebook have for anyone outside the US education system? I'm not from the US and I have only an extremely vague idea. No idea about the etymology of Ikea. Slack has actually been a tough sale in more conservative organisations before it got so hugely popular, probably in part because of the negative connotations the name carries – who wants to put their name underneath spending lots on a tool nobody knows, but that's named "Slack"? – and while I don't have a very large set of anecdata for this, I believe the same is true for Riot, maybe to a lesser degree because of the Matrix brand.

It's not catchy, I agree, more like – bland? I think that's fine, it doesn't have to beat Slack on controversial naming. Matrix could become absolutely huge by being adopted in large EU organizations and orgs elsewhere worried about exposing all their communication to the US, so being a bit bland is a feature, much like MS Teams, which must have people in charge of making the product as boring as possible, but it's making inroads into close to all large orgs over here that I'm aware of, and being deeply uncontroversial is certainly part of the reason why.

Plus, for catchiness, there's always Matrix, and I actually like the Element-of-a-Matrix jeux-des-mots.

>No idea about the etymology of Ikea.

Not easy, IKEA is an acronym. It represents the founder's first name, last name, home farm, and home village respectively (Ingvar, Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd).

I like it. +1

Riot has a political connotation. It's good not to have to try and sell to other people that you're on "riot".

If I randomly see the URL "element.io" I'd think it's like a Bootstrap alternative or something.

Signal and Telegram are more obvious, yes, but it's not like unrelated or unique names couldn't work.

Slack comes to mind. Or, I seek you?

ICQ has a quirky meaning to it,once you get it,it's like what you use when you seek someone (not really but the mental association is there). Slack? Not sure, it's popular in tech but I've only used it when I have no other choice but I associated it with slacking off (as in when you want to talk informally relax and talk non-work) or having slack (break or headroom),so when someone says let's chat on Slack, I think of a fun interaction that is more akin to taking a break.

But to your point, the only good thing about Skype for example is few syllables and messaging related graphics/logo for me.

Slack is an absolutely horrible name, especially for work-related purposes; it doesn't reflect messaging but laziness and productivity waste.

Which is exactly the point of the name, isn't it? The name makes you think of leisure time, but in fact you are still working and discussing work-related things while using it.

You haven't seen most people use slack then

I actually don't like "Signal" either, because it's such a common word that it makes it hard to search for it online. "Telegram" is marginally better, since original telegrams are not very relevant today.

But yeah Element is arguably even worse, it's a super common noun and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with communication.

But in the end these naming discussions are always going to end up as bikeshedding. If the tech is good it'll probably manage to be successful despite its mediocre name.

This name is not mediocre, it's sub par. It's not searchable, memorable on its own or memorable in relation to what it's for. You need at least one of those.

In the post they described searchability as one of the strenghts, as the top hits were dictionary link. They also said they're currently #4 for Riot, proving the viability of "dictionary names." As far as memorability, the whole Element in Matrix network is a little corny/convoluted to me, but oh well.

Wait until they start adding to it.

Element Prime Element Whisper

It is not great, but it is also not a disaster. See Go, React, Rust, Processing, Atom, Windows, etc...

Windows makes sense. Windows to the world. Go has a sensible keyword: golang for searchability.

Atom is awful. Rust is awful (programs rust and fall apart over time). React is not bad, it reacts to data changes. Processing is unknown to me.

I was trying to address the point of the parent comment, that using common words is detrimental to searchability. I think that is true, but as shown by the examples I gave, it is not catastrophic and can be worked around.

Processing: https://processing.org/

Atom and rust have a technical audience

I agree that these names are kind of meh, but they stand for things that will mostly be chosen on their technical merit, and that you don't have to sell to your friends/mom/gf/brother/etc; so it does not really matter.

Right, good point. It is a quality of uniqueness for searchability and marketability. On top of my head I can only think of a couple of counterexamples: Windows and Messenger, but your point is still very valid.

I guess in practice, for search purposes, we will see some kind of suffix attached to the name, Element Chat or similar.

Mint's default image viewer is called Pix. I tried looking up a crash/bug I was getting... it's basically impossible to search for. I still don't know what some developers are thinking when they name things.

Who would use a word "element" in their daily conversation that is indistinguishable from the context?

You must be some scientist? I don't see people crying over the company name Apple.

I think "let's chat on Element" has an awesome ring to it, personally :D

"I know I have Adobe Elements installed somewhere but I never knew it was a chat app"

Not to ape your message but this, exactly. Element is much better than riot. Now if only I could find it in fdroid or GP.

Joke: I think I'm starting to see the hacker news version of the gell-mann amnesia effect, when you read something you have no opinion of, the hacker news people sound so smart, but when you read something, form your own opinion first, and then arrive at the HN comments to see everyone melting down, you wonder "where did all the smart people go?" 5 minutes later, you are back to being part of the concern mob. :)

Somehow I hadn't made the connection that WhatsApp sounds like "What's up" until now.

Someone had to explain it to me before I got it. I still think it's a bad name.

Like wise...

I've worked for or had Element as a client a couple different times in my career. Each time, it was a different company. The name is rather elementary.

element and whatsapp have clearly nothing to do with communication, element must be some chemistry app and whatsapp some social network I guess

Whatsapp sounds lile what's up

"Hey bro, let's chat on (the) Matrix." Use your favourite client.

People need to be able to find the Element app with a search of Matrix. So the Element Matrix client should work nicely. Working with a company that used Element as part of it's brand name, it was remembered, but no one ever said the Element part. I've seen first hand that people aren't crazy about installing an app on their phone called Riot. Hopefully the new name works.

Whatsapp can be an extremely confusing name for non-native English speakers. I'm from Spain and I think 90% of the time I see it written in Spain, it's written wrong (wassap, whasapp, wuatsapp, whatsap, watsap, wuassap, wuassapp, whatsup, watsup, etc.). Sometimes a phonetically "transliterated" version is used instead, like "guasap", which I find more tolerable because at least then it becomes a genuine Spanish word, rather than a botched attempt at writing an English word.

Also, many people don't get the meaning/pun in the name at all (which probably is one of the reasons for writing it wrong). Even to me, with a good English level, it wasn't immediate because "what's up" is a very idiomatic greeting and not one that non-natives (or at least, Spanish people) tend to use in a natural way. It took some time to click in my mind.

That said, Whatsapp absolutely dominates chat apps in Spain... so I guess these issues are not that important after all. Or at least, not if you are at the right place at the right time.

This is so true. I remember this when I had a conversation with a Spanish developer and he said Java mid-sentence...

Tangential, but I would recommend considering "What's up?" to be the standard informal/low-register idiomatic greeting in American English. It's like "Ce faci?" in Romanian - indeed you'll sometimes get even native English speakers responding with "Good, and you?"

I second this, as an American. “What’s up”, “hey”, or “yo” (or some combination of the above like “yo, what’s up?”) are all extremely ubiquitous and way more common than more standard greetings like “hi” or “hello”, I in my experience.

So how do you reply to "What's up", by saying "Not much" or repeating "What's up"? I've never been able to figure this one out.

"How's it going?"

I'm actually not 100% sure now that I think about it, but I think what I do is figure out from the intonation/context whether it's intended as a generic greeting (in which case I'd repeat it back) or as an actual question (in which case I might respond with "oh, not much, what about you?" or similar).

"What's up" is actually a true invitation to tell the person recent events that have happened to you. If you don't want to give many details, possible responses are "Not much", "Same old, same old", "Nothing new", etc. You can also respond in the same way as you would to "How are you?", e.g. "Let's see, I'm doing good, trying to stay sane in Corona-times, but healthy!"

You should never just repeat "What's up" back without first answering the question. That is, it's OK to say "Not much, what's up with you?" but not just point black "What's up" in response.

I'd be cautious calling it a "true invitation"; it is true that someone who greets with "what's up" isn't going to be put off by a brief legitimate answer, but the greeter is likely not trying to introduce a conversation topic on your well-being, and may be caught off-guard if you launch into an extensive answer.

I would also caution against strongly saying that one should "never" fail to answer the question; in the US at least, it's such a common/generic expression that nobody is likely to be offended if you respond with "hey, how's it going?", or "hey, what's up?", or "what's up with you?".

The situation is similar to "howdy", which almost nobody outside the US south realizes is actually a question (short for "how are you doing?"). Sincerely answering "howdy" with e.g. "I'm fine, thanks" is a bit of a shibboleth that southerners can use to identify each other, but failure to do so is not any real faux pas.

For a phatic ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression ) greeting like this, you're pretty much safe to respond with any other phatic greeting. These phrases just serve as verbal handshakes of acknowledgement, and don't need to be interpreted literally.

If you are a father, “the sky.” Otherwise, just repeating “what’s up” or “hey, how are you!?” is fine.

Wow, native English speaker and I didn't even get the pun until this comment. I thought it was a stupid play on "What app should we message each other on?" and thus kind of a silly name. But folks use it regardless.

Also a native English speaker, also had no idea it was supposed to be a pun until right now. I just thought it was another silly name from an Asian company.

Complete tangent, but, by any chance, when you read things, do you not 'hear' a voice in your head reading them?

Curious, because I'm pretty sure the first time I ran across Whatsapp it was in text, but I tend to 'hear' the things I read/write in my head, as though a voice read them to me. And because of that the pun stuck out. It might just be I'm more inclined to look for puns (playing games with them all the time with friends and family), but wondering if that might be part of it: if you just see the name and it's just a word, not something sounded out in your head, you of course would not notice the play on words.

I don't think that's it, I hear words in my head, but didn't get the pun until I watched a Jimmy Fallon bit where he made fun of the name.

Following on this train, as an fluent English speaker, millennial, Asian American that grew up in Texas public school all my life, and a lover of memes and puns...I also didn't realize WhatsApp was a pun...woah.

Well that proves it, it's not a great name :)

85% of people hear their voice when reading / forming thoughts.

And then there are the others [1].

1 https://twitter.com/KylePlantEmoji/status/122171379291396506...

Are you thinking of Wechat? Whatsapp is run by Facebook.

As a nonuser of WhatsApp, I don't care who owns it. Thinking the app comes from Asia is understandable; There's a large number of apps coming from Asia whose names sound nonsensical in the West (quite likely some of them have as much meaning as our own apps have, and are just foreign words or sounds). There's not many apps coming from Africa or South America these days (that I'm aware of), while Asia has quite a lot.

Really? I'm a native Spanish speaker, and the first thing I thought when learning about the app was that[1] ad.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W16qzZ7J5YQ

(Forgive me, it was still recent around here at the time the app got popular).

I don't even have to open the link to know that it's that budweiser ad. That's where my mind goes too when I think about the name of the app.

I think whatsapp has a nice ring to it, even if people doesn't know how to write it. Surely being able to write it on a store search is important, but not as important as sounding good.

-----

And does people get the name of Waze? It took me a while, because in this case not being a native English speaker is a real problem.

QuepasApp?

Hahaha thank you for making me laugh so hard

As a pedantic native English speaker, the name "WhatsApp" has always irritated me somehow. It's just not nice. There's an apostrophe missing, it's two words with intermediate capitalization and no space, "App" in the name of an app is redundant, the "pun" is a bit dumb (does it even really qualify as a pun?)...

But it's clearly worked out well for them, so I guess it's a good thing people like me weren't involved in their naming. shrug

I agree with you. You know what's worse? FaceApp. But somehow, the general public just gets it. This is what the peoples like.

> That said, Whatsapp absolutely dominates chat apps in Spain... so I guess these issues are not that important after all. Or at least, not if you are at the right place at the right time.

This was the case, but the market has changed. At the time, here in Spain Whatsapp was marketed as "like text, but free". We were still spending about 12 cents per SMS back then, or buying silly packages like "100 sms for 10 euro", so getting it was a no brainer. Anyone could have sold that idea.

Nowadays, however, whatsapp is so ubiquitous that I'm not even sure they can be replaced anytime soon, so if someone wants to undertake that task they better have all the help they can get.

In Brazil we call it "Zap".

WhatsApp dominates Brazil completely as well, and people called it ZapZap or just zap.

the way my family in Spain says Whatsapp is so funny. "tengo un mesnaje en la wassa"

It's a clever name. As an english speaker if some comms app out of spain named QuéPasapp that I wouldn't declare that it's name should be changed just because it's based on a spanish expression? I don't really see the problem. Until there's a universal language that everyone speaks this will happen over and over.

I just realized what the name mean, knowing the expression at least since wazzzzaaaaahh

You're allowed to dislike the name.

I like the new name.

If you're pissed about Element, you must be absolutely livid about Apple.

> If you're pissed about Element, you must be absolutely livid about Apple.

Nope. 'Apple Computer Inc.' already marketed themselves specifically first in 'computers' and that association was built over the years.

After they had success in products that weren't attached to only 'desktop/laptop computers' it made sense to remove 'Computer' from the name. The same was done for Tesla Motors Inc. to Tesla Inc.

This is more like a full blown renaming of Riot, New Vector, Modular -> Element. You need to rebuild that SEO and previous associations from scratch again.

Sorry, you missed the point of my comment. I was addressing the original commenter's dislike of the specific name Element because of its generic nature.

And you're missing the point that "Apple" is a decades-old brand that everyone knows. It doesn't need to be explained to anyone now.

Element is a new chat app that people won't have heard of and thus does need to be explained, and the "Element" name isn't helping in that regard because it's extremely generic and has nothing to do with messaging. Even worse, it has bad name collision problems; I just Googled "element app" and all the results are other apps named Element, including one hosted at elementapp.com (which will seem like a more legitimate domain name to many casual users than element.io).

I was talking about when Apple originally came about, not Apple today.

Wasn’t it originally Apple Computer?

And for every one success story along the vein of Apple, there's hundreds of failure stories (caused by a variety of reasons). Having a good name gives you a better chance than having a bad name. You're just exhibiting survivorship/selection bias here.

And anyway, they were known as "Apple Computer" back then. See e.g. this ad: https://i.redd.it/f1o3uol6q2dx.jpg The name is not at all ambiguous. It was good branding relative to its competitors.

You might as well say the same argument about Snapchat Inc. who is now known as Snap. Even more generic than 'Apple' as it is used as a verb, adjective and now a company name which appears at the top of the Google search results despite the founders launching their company as Snapchat Inc.

From a SEO point of view, The transition of 'New Vector' -> 'Element' is just as bad since the continuity of the name is completely lost and has to compete again in the SEO rankings.

The thing is with very generic names in search engines and word of mouth, continuity is essential and the creators of Riot have to rebuild it again with a generic name.

I also missed it, I'd say it's not a good example. Apple is not a generic word, it's very specifically about fruit or tech which are concepts with little-to-no overlap. Element is a word that appears throughout life and technology with both specific and generic usages which will often closely relate, in a confusing way.

> pissed

I didn't get that from the comment. Did we read the same comment?

> Apple

Now you're just comparing Apples to Elements. One is a general purpose device, and the other has a specific purpose, providing an opportunity to elude to that purpose through the name.

Apple is the company name. The product names (ios, mac os, ipad ...) are all unique enough.

People talk a lot about apples, but AFAIK there's no other time the singular word "apple" comes up in the English language without an article, other than in reference to the company.

Apple and many fruit names are catchy and memorable. Like blackberry!

Secrets could have been a good ( and hilarious) name... 'let's chat in Secrets'

It fails the two syllable rule. All the best companies/bands/groups have two syllable names. If by chance a company succeeds without the two syllable name, a two syllable pseudonym will materialize.

Am a zon? Mic ro soft?

Microsoft Amazon Facebook Instagram ?

Facebook is two syllables.

Like Toyota

>a two syllable pseudonym will materialize

Hmm, which sounds better?

"Let's chat on the 'ment"

"Let's chat on Ele"

I'm trying to guess which will get used. I'm thinking the second one.

Or maybe just drop the 'e' and say "Let's talk on el'ment"?

That might confuse some Europeans though, maybe just "e'ment" is better.

Ele sounds pretty good to me, pronounced like Elly.

"I'll meet you in the Matrix".

How cooler than that can it be? I wouldn't be surprised if matrix-based apps get popular at first by using the protocol name, and only them using the app name as a differentiator.

"My niece installed me this app for chatting in the Matrix, what was it called? Ah yes, Element Matrix."

Toshiba, Mercedes, IBM, Microsoft, ycombinator, and my humble employer is Twilio. That is 10 seconds of names off the top of my head. I guess Mercedes is often shortened to Benz.

Microsoft = MS

IBM = Big Blue

Ycombinator = YC

Toshiba = Toshi

off the top of my head ;)

Not sure about Twilio, but upon first scan with my old eyes I wanted to read it as 'twillow'

. o O ( ellie the element )

Ellie sounds better than Element.

Do you actually say “MS?” I’ve only heard that as a prefix, like “MS DOS” or “MS Word,” but I’ve never heard someone say they work for “MS” or that “MS” makes Xbox. I’ve also never heard “Big Blue” nor “Toshi.” I have heard “HN,” so got me there.

BTW Toshiba is consists of Tou + Shiba in Japanese so it is two syllable name.

How is “shiba” one syllable? Is it pronounced differently in Japanese?

Amazon Microsoft Mac and cheese Oreo's Doritos McDonald's Whataburger

I feel like you want us to answer the name of the most popular of the four messaging apps in the list, but telegram is the one named after a way of communicating.

So what is your point?

Agreed. This is an absolutely horrible name that I'm sure was chosen by poll or committee.

What was wrong with Riot anyway? It wasn't the best name but it was known. Most name changes are mistakes.

Because Riot means Riot Games to a substantial portion of the internet.

Every time I see news about Riot I immediately think about Riot Games and League of Legends. I guess most people who don't know Element will assume Riot in the context of a messaging app is some client they have done to work alongside LoL. Riot Games is too big for anything else computer-related to manage to succeed, especially if males between 15 and 35 years are a significant part of their target customer base.

I don't even play LoL and I still think of Riot = Riot Games.

I'm willing to bet that was also a factor in their name change. In fact, a quick Google search for Riot brings up Riot games as the first result and the wikipedia entry for them appears on the side bar. So I'm guessing this was the case for the vast majority of Americans.

From the article:

>This name change has been a long time in the making. As we explained when we announced the rebrand a few weeks ago, we’ve had major issues with a certain gigantic games company which has blocked us from being able to trademark Riot or even Riot.im - a huge issue when it comes to defending users against abusive forks of the app.

I thought that they renamed due to BLM movement or something until read the sentence.

On the other hand,

“Do you have Element?”

is less confusing than

“Do you have Signal?”

Reminder: you can fork and rename the software into whatever you want

Does any statement starting with "Hey bro" have a ring to it?

How does the name WhatsApp convey a theme of messaging and communication? Signal and Telegram are obvious.

It's worth noting that other services have equally nonsensical names. Skype, Slack. Others, like Line, have only a vague connection that take thinking about to see.

See the list of services mentioned in Wikipedia's IM template; only half of them mention chat, talk, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Instant_messaging

I should note that I'm not saying I agree it's a good name (I don't have an opinion on that, personally), just that it's not unusual.

As someone who uses none of the above, "Hey bro, let's chat on Element" and "Hey bro, let's chat on Riot" have the same ring.

Press release pro tip: sidle in what the company or app does very early in. Verging on all of the releases I read on HN don't do this but are for companies I've not heard of. So you leave knowing almost nothing about the company

That's a good point. I've noticed larger enterprises doing this with their pr's, which has always struck me as bit silly when it is a house hold name (Oracle, Canonical, VMWare etc) but ofc not everyone would know them. But for smaller vendors this becomes even more important.

Household names for a very specific set of households :)

Yes indeed its pretty universal for PLCs to do it.

Some examples to demonstrate

[1] ...LexisNexis® CounselLink®, a leading cloud-based enterprise legal management solution for corporate law departments, today announced the release...

[2] ...RecVue, Inc., the fastest growing next generation order-to-cash automation platform, today announced...

etc

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lexisnexis-counsell... [2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/recvue-achieves-soc...

Also on a company home/about page.

oops, excellent point. I've added "For those discovering us for the first time: Element is the flagship secure collaboration app for the decentralised Matrix communication network." as the 2nd main para.

On mobile (galaxy S5, Firefox), the first and last letters of the text in the header image at https://element.io/blog/welcome-to-element/ are cut off, so I just see "wm your conversation".

This is one thing I always loved about The Economist - it didn't matter how obvious an entity might seem, they would always qualify what it is when mentioned in an article, never presuming upon their readers' knowledge, eg. "...Google, an internet search engine, ..."

- ed: typo

You have to consider than in 100 years, people may not really widely know what Google was.

But the only people reading 100-year-old articles will be historians who can/should track down those references.

Yes, please. The first couple paragraphs of this PR I thought I was reading about Riot Games renaming themselves.

If you dislike the new name, branding, or user experience, instead of arguing over why or why not it is a good decision, I'd encourage you to get yourself involved and be that change.

Before the rebrand, or even any talk user experience and design from Element (Riot), I didn't want to wait and started working on a privacy centric matrix client that focused on branding and user experience. I managed to get E2EE working by myself within a month using the Matrix provided encryption library.

https://syphon.org

https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon

For the record, I don't think Element is a bad name. Regardless of the name itself, this is a massive leap forward for their branding. The user experience seems to have been cleaned up dramatically in the new versions of their iOS and Android apps.

Wow, this is slick. I'm sure there's a lot of work to be done, but how far along is cross-signing at this point?

it's next on the list after group E2EE is stable along with key import/exports

Speaking of branding, Dart isn't the best brand either. I mean anyone interested in it would search for Dart language. Just like anyone interested would sarch for Element matrix.

I tried your client with my own synapse instance but couldn't login, no error message. I click the question mark to search for instances, click use my instance, fill in username:instance.tld but nothing happens.

It works with RiotX.

Is your "<synapse_domain>/.well-known/matrix/client" set up?

I assume so, I mean it took a while to get it right so that Riot would work. But now both Fractal, RiotX, the old Android app and Riot-web work fine.

We can continue this in the Issues I guess. I noticed there was a planned improvement for error snackbars in the login so that would solve half of the issue. But I found no other issue with problems logging in open right now.

There is currently a snackbar in the login for errors. Just signed out and typed in a wrong password to make sure I didn't break anything. However, I am on version 0.0.19. If you downloaded the app from F-Droid, you're on the first public build. I'm still trying to get another update out from the initial release.

I've added a new ticket linking back to this comment and I'll look into the issue. I have several people using Syphon with their own homeservers successfully so I'm thinking the problem has to do with a silent error that's unrelated. Thanks for the feedback though and feel free to respond in the github issue itself.

I just tried this on Android from F-Droid. I couldn't get past the login page, unfortunately. Bitwarden popped up to auto fill the form, but it didn't work. I tried typing my credentials manually, but it was rough because of the weird quirks with the text boxes. Why does the carat jump to the last character after every keypress? It made it nearly impossible for me to correct a typo. My password is pretty long, which royally confused the password input field. After a certain number of characters, it just stopped displaying anything. It also does not respect my system preference of not displaying the most recently typed character unmasked. Finally, after all that, I clicked login and the button just changed to a spinner forever.

I realize this is alpha quality software, but to claim to be focused on user experience and have such horrible UI issues does not give me any confidence, sadly.

I've addressed these problems you listed in version 0.0.19 but getting updates to the F-Droid store is a very slow process. The next F-Droid release will have auto updates enabled with the F-Droid team, so those and future issues should be fixed relatively quick from that platform.

Regardless, thanks for trying it out.

Edit: feel free to post issues like this directly to the project in github if you decide to try it out again

In many respects, Syphon is a good name. Short (two syllables!), memorable, reasonably easy to write and set to become easy to search for.

And yet you've failed.

It's not just that siphoning something off has shady connotations already in general usage[1], but that in tech reporting specifically, it's referring to the mass exfiltration of data:

"How Facebook Was Able to Siphon Off Phone Call and Text Logs"[2]

"StrandHogg 2.0 can also hijack other app permissions to siphon off sensitive user data, like contacts, photos, and track a victim’s real-time location."[3]

"Perhaps the most sinister of them all is an attack designed to siphon off your organisation’s data, otherwise known as data exfiltration."[4]

"Data exfiltration is how hackers siphon out valuable intelligence from a business."[5]

"Report: Chinese Hackers Siphon Off ‘Massive’ Amounts of Undersea Military Data"[6]

To name a messaging app like that might almost seem like overt cynicism to casual observers.

I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out. What is it that I have missed?

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/sipho...

[2] https://newstalk1290.com/how-facebook-was-able-to-siphon-off...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/strandhogg-malicious-apps-...

[4] https://www.csa.gov.sg/gosafeonline/go-safe-for-business/sme...

[5] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/10/02/dns-exfiltration/

[6] https://threatpost.com/report-chinese-hackers-siphon-off-mas...

PS: Nice graphics on your website, very pleasant to look at and built with diversity in mind–but what the heck is the dude looking at the black circle supposed to signify? I'd get rid of that one. To be very frank, it appears to be something vulgar to me. O;)

That's been long overdue and will hopefully help Matrix make inroads into more conservative organizations; I believe the tech is really promising. It's a definite liability, trying to introduce people to Matrix, when the de-facto default client's name evokes all kinds of unhelpful associations – it doesn't sound like work at all and it does sound like gamers, toys, apparently even like a far-left political organisation. Element should be fine for everyone.

Glad you like it, the original idea was to think of Riot in terms of a 'Riot of Colour', though in practice it can be interpreted in lots of different ways.

We think Element has much broader appeal and really like the association with being the smallest indivisible unit.

I've honestly never heard it used that way. I have no idea what that means. Is it a British thing? I've only ever heard it used one way.

British here, I've definitely heard it used that way but it's not the first thing that comes to mind.

American here. It's not just a British thing, but it's definitely not a very common use of the word.

I think "riot of color," however, is just one instance of a particular, positive use of the word "riot." More broadly, "riot" can mean something like "a really fun thing" (as in "Let's hang out with that guy, he's a riot!"). But I'm not surprised that Element/Riot found that this was not the primary association that folks were making.

In the previous post comments there was an interesting debate on the etymology of the word riot. It's a French borrow in the Middle English era, so its etymology is at best "complicated". The "riot of color" idiom was one of the first written usages in English indeed predating the use of the term for violence, but the French word was "debate/quarrel" so it's hard to rule out that violence or negative connotations weren't always hand in hand in the metaphor underlying "riot of color".

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/riot+of+colours

Still doesn't make any sense ...

I'm just now understanding that moving away from the name Riot was to distance it from recent US riots in mental space.

Even if these "toys" were instrumental in driving technological progress, it makes sense to rename it for "conservative" organisations. Some say the smarter ones should give in, so just make it easy to swallow.

Although I don't see widespread adoption yet if Matrix bridges aren't implemented by the common household names. Conservative organisations use solutions from Apple or Microsoft. There is no deeper thought behind it.

That said, I think they just did it because of trademark issues. Private users are probably converted by their environment and probably don't think too much about the name.

Worth pointing out that some of the largest proponents of Matrix today are governments and civic institutions. The federated nature and ability to self host are really important to them.

The French government's installation has been in the public domain for sometime (https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...)

More recently the German Education authority has announced that it will roll out a 500K user installation - this is the world’s largest-ever single contract for a collaborative software service (https://sifted.eu/articles/element-germany-deal/)

True. An important first step. Glad to see that there is a conscious effort now. Hope Matrix succeds and sees widespread applications.

>The federated nature and ability to self host are really important to them.

It's important to everyone, whether they realize it or not.

And if not already, then it is definitely becoming so.

To my knowledge these governments have so far all deployed their own forks with their own branding and features.

If I'm an organisation, e.g. a company, I don't want end-to-end encryption, I want to make sure I have access to all messages within the company and between employees.

So I'm not sure a tool that is encrypted end-to-end will be that appealing to me not matter the name unless there is a feature around that.

On the other hand, individuals who are savvy enough to look for such a tool may not worry too much about the name.

Element is end to end encrypted by default for private rooms and 1:1 chats, but the Matrix protocol does not mandate the use of end to end encryption since it doesn't make sense for some use cases, particularly for public world readable rooms and IoT application.

There are organisations today that use Element without e2ee, though in practice we find that most see e2ee as a plus point - especially with the recent UX improvements (https://element.io/blog/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-sign...).

Good to know that it can be used without e2e encryption.

I don't see e2e as a plus point in a corporate environment because there is always a need to retrieve communications in some cases (which has nothing to do with UX).

Since you run the matrix server in that environment you can add a hook for a master corporate account to be auto included in every room made. It would then be privy to any encryption keys.

looking at you, git

funny thing about git is as a non-Brit, I thought for the longest time it was a made up word.

I thought so too (not a native English speaker, had never seen that word before) until I read a quote from Linus saying that he likes to name his projects after himself.

All words are made up words.

Real developer™ use something called Subversion anyway

I've always wondered about that one too. I mean naming is a minefield, but using a name that's well known to be at least mildly offensive in a particular dialect of English is probably something I would have chosen to avoid. I suppose at least they didn't call it "prck", "twt", or "cnt". One has to be grateful for small mercies.

From what I recall it was intentional on part of the early git team. They did want to make it clear it was a "dumb" VCS compared to work going on in some of the smarter ones such as darcs. git has always had something of the Unix "worse is better" philosophy at its core, and it is amusing it chose to wear that so much on its sleeve that it took that as a name.

Is "twat" worse than "git"? I thought it was relatively mild as well

I think you'd get different answers from different people but you can really put your back into the UK pronunciation of "twat" to make it sound really venomous, as opposed to the much more innocuous "twot" pronunciation of the US. That tends to make it more offensive. "Git" just doesn't have quite the same impact.

For any other confused Americans:

Git is a term of insult with origins in English denoting an unpleasant, silly, incompetent, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person. As a mild oath it is roughly on a par with prat and marginally less pejorative than berk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)

One of the best pranks I've seen is people getting endorsed for git on LinkedIn, from coworkers who don't think quite so high of them as pretended during office hours.

> coworkers who don't think quite so high of them as pretended during office hours

Sounds malicious.

Does the name really inhibit adoption in a corporate environment that much, or is it just an excuse people put down in questionnaires?

Plenty of popular tools with questionable names. Splunk and slack comes to mind.

purely anecdotal but I've seen it twice that a piece of software was rejected because of a weird name.

Probably doesn't happen often, but there's people when they have a few alternatives they'll just throw the strange sounding one out first.

I'd think I'm far from the only one who finds CockroachDB simply repulsive merely for its name.

OT, but I refer to it as RoachDB and that helps a lot.

Roach could be a last name, or a type of chocolate...

Roach is often used as a synonym for cockroach

Or a basically finished joint

I can vouch that I avoided deploying it in corp environments due to the questionable name. "Element" is fine and is generic just like "Matrix". So name really does matter (specially in formal/corporate environments).

Your comment doesn't mean much if your company is on Slack. The "Slack" name can present issues for other people just like "Riot" has presented for you.

Yes, even in 2016 I had non-techies think that an IM chat designed for the workplace called "Slack" was some sort of joke.

This comment section is remarkable. If the name change is perceived to be in order to be welcoming to corporate, nobody has a problem with that. Imagine if the name change was perceived to be in order to be more welcoming to underrepresented people. We would have endless discussions about pc culture, and how the name is not bad at all, etc...

Do you have an example of when a name change has generated such discussions?

recent thing with github and renaming "master"

? Seems like there's plenty of disagreement on the name here.

Makes sense, considering HN has plenty of people from corporations and more or less no people from marginalized groups.

I don't like the new name, is too generic. I think an original alternative would have been better, like Trello, Slack, ...

I think those names are taken.

(Really though, Slack is as generic of a word as Element! It just had a strong connotation now)

Yeah they are taken, I meant a name of that kind, rather than an already existing word that is pretty common too

Slack is an existing word that's pretty common word, though, which was my point.

So are Zoom, Medium, Apple, Windows, Segment, etc. We just don't remember that sometimes, because the company has redefined the word.

No, it's just that I'm not a native English speaker, I'm realizing just now that I checked on WordReference that "slack" is an existing word

Ah, apologizes then! Didn’t realize you weren’t a native speaker at all :) in that case, I can see it seeming like a made up word!

People often get confused, they think the word is strong (Nike,Google,...) while the word nearly never is. As you've said it's the other way around, what the company evokes in us with their product over time is brought back to the name.

That does not mean that a generic name is fine.

It means that a unique, made-up word is fine because it will gain meaning. It may sound strange now because it is new and unknown but that does not matter because that will change. 'Google' went to a strange, made-up word, to being an everyday noun and verb.

In that respect a made-up word is the best option because you start with a blank slate and you can create its meaning.

Whereas a generic word already has meaning, several competing ones, even, and you have to struggle against that to build your brand, so it's an inferior choice.

Yes, I also tell people whom I consult to use a short, easy to remember fantasy word. I like a mix, like Mailchimp which evokes images in customers.

Though as Apple, Nike, Windows, Slack, Segment have shown, the generic approach can work.

Yeah, I share that feeling a bit, it's definitely going to make searching for things related to it difficult.

Eg, I just Googled element: "About 2,480,000,000 results (0.68 seconds)"

Ironically Riot.im is the 4th hit for me on an incognito VPN'd browser for the word Riot. So I hope that Element will end up with the same visibility :)

The best of the 3 names was Vector imho and it was still quite generic.

Agreed. Catchy names also have 1 to 2 syllables, usually, so Element seems a bit unwieldy. But maybe they want to step back a bit and give the Matrix brand a boost.

I am always surprised when I see projects choosing such general names. This will make SEO and name recognition so much harder. Not adopting such generic names should be elemental wisdom. Guess now at least they are always in their element though. /s

slack is not very original if you think about it.

No, it's just that I'm not a native English speaker, I'm realizing just now that I checked on WordReference that "slack" is an existing word!

I'm not sure what it is with companies just picking a name from the English dictionary. You could be a little more inventive and come up with something either foreign or new-ish. Even a wrong but witty spelling of an existing word would do, but things like Apple, Amazon, Slack, Bird, Riot, Glassdoor... come on.

Not to take away from the tremendous work they're doing but that name really isn't good.

Agreed. Generic names are difficult to find help on, especially in the software world. Like that modelling tool which was mentioned a while back - "Hash". Imagine googling for "Hash syntax error".

What's next, an ITIL-enabled accounting system called 'IT'?

Yeah - it is a pain trying to search for technical support for overloaded terms. Matrix is an especially bad one given the mathematical terms. I think Riot was a terrible choice for a messenger name, especially for an encrypted one (doing the work of politicians to demonize it for them) but it would still be easier to search for because preciously there weren't IT questions about riots.

Previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611863 and blog post about why https://element.io/blog/the-world-is-changing/ and the blog post about the new name https://element.io/blog/welcome-to-element/

Main reason is that they couldn't trademark the "Riot" name due to "Riot Games" company.

Edit: They have mentioned this in the blog. Please read that before downvoting.

Could they trademark Element though? I mean it is a very general term.

We tried to trademark Element and another generic abbreviation as a combined name and even that was not possible. The german trademark bureau just sent us printed wikipedia articles of both words as "proof" that it's not possible.

I'm cracking up right now imagining that this was the only thing you received in reply.

haha of course not, but that was essentially their argument for the denial.

After various HN threads about this company, and taking a tour on the element.io website, I'm still not sure what this is about to be honest.

I understand it's a chat app, but

- The pricing is really confusing (seems like the app is free, but having an account is paying ?). - Is this a professional thing, like slack, or more of a whatsapp-like thing ? Trying to do both ? The whole differentation point seems to be based on the Matrix thing, but it's not really clear why is that important ? (I don't typically care about the backend of the app I use).

I mean, the front page says : "All-in-one secure chat app for teams, friends and organisations. Keeps conversations in your control, safe from data-mining and ads. Talk to everyone through the open global Matrix network, protected by proper end-to-end encryption."

So, the starter is what everyone says. "Safe from data mining and ads" is good, it makes me curious about what is the pricing then, and I wouldn't mind paying a cheap price for a correct messaging app. And then there's this Matrix bit, and I don't even know if it's good or bad. So I went to the pricing page (which doesn't exist, but there are "plans") and here, well the app is free, and I can get my account hosted either somewhere free, or either on the Element Matrix servers, where it should be safe from eavesdropping ? But with proper end to end encryption, it should be safe everywhere ? Or is the app by default not end to end encrypted, but hosting it somewhere makes it so ? It sounds really weird to be honest.

So really, good for you for renaming, but I don't think it's what will make me change (even though since whatsapp is facebook owned, I'm ready to migrate myself and my whole family on something else once the ads are there).

Matrix is a decentralised e2e-encrypted chat protocol (similar model to email) that you can self-host and is all free software. Encryption is between devices so the homeserver doesn't see the contents, but if you self-host then only the homeservers involved in the chat ever see your encrypted messages -- this is in contrast to centralised services like Signal where everything goes through one entity. You can create a free account on Matrix.org and it works perfectly fine.

But you're quite right that most users might not care about that (though a fair number of people care about having control over their data, which Matrix gives them since you can self-host a federated server).

Element is now an umbrella brand for several things:

* The most widely used cross-platform Matrix client (used to be called Riot and even further back was called Vector).

* A paid service where they will host a Matrix homeserver for you (used to be called Modular). This is what all of the pricing plans you saw are talking about. Unless you want to host your own server and don't want to manage it yourself, this isn't relevant for you.

* The legal entity which hired people to develop those things as well as contribute to Matrix (used to be called VectorLabs).

This isn't really that big of an announcement, Matrix has existed for at least 5 years now and I've been using it for a while. It's just that a common complaint (the scatter-brained branding) is being resolved by giving a single name to all of these parts (save Matrix -- the protocol -- which is keeping its name).

Does anyone know why they moved away from vector in the first place? It made sense with the protocol being named matrix. Was it seo?

It was collision with the game Vector (a parkour game), as well as being a bit too geeky and not mainstream enough.

Matrix is the protocol, Element is a client to access Matrix which it does so via a matrix homeserver (which then federates across the rest of the Matrix).

So Element is free to use, but there are a range of servers to choose from. The matrix.org server is free to use, though as the largest single instance on the public federation is run on a best effort basis.

Alternatives are to either host your own server, or have someone else do that for you. The payment plans that you are looking at reference Element Matrix Services (EMS) which is a SaaS offering allowing you to spin up your own server to be used by whoever you choose to give access to (friends/colleagues etc). The advantages being that you get grater control of your data and improved performance.

Using email as an analogy

Matrix = Email matrix.org / Matrix Hosted Services/ some other server = Fastmail/Gmail/Hotmail etc Element = Thunderbird

Yes but does EMS allow white labeling clients also ?

The clients are mostly Apache 2 licensed, and at least Riot Web has config options to swap out some of the branding at deploy time: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/blob/develop/docs/conf...

It's not a marketed use case though, so I'm sure you could find places the app will still refer to itself as Riot (or now Element).

Alternatively the protocol is open so many third party clients exist: https://matrix.org/clients/ . Feature support in third party clients is pretty unevenly distributed though, E2EE in particular is supported in Riot and Seaglass, experimental in weechat-matrix and nheko, and absent in basically every other client.

Got it..

EMS lets you point your own DNS at your client as well as customise the branding. Beyond that, you can run/fork your own client too.

I gotta say; I haven't paid attention to Matrix for years, but I downloaded the Riot client again last week and HOLY COW. Everything is so smooth, beautiful, performant, and feature-filled.

They have Slack/Discord-like communities, awesome easy E2E verification, and almost every feature I want out of Discord, including video/voice chat powered by WebRTC out of the box.

Really incredible work the Matrix team has done on this. I was a decentralization reseracher for years, and I'd never imagined things would get this polished from a UI perspective. I think Matrix is the best current bet for decentralization services (Urbit following up in a close second), and will plan on digging in to hosting my own server at some point.

If you haven't used Riot / Element in a while, I highly recommend you give it a try. Smooth as butter.

[edit: the bikeshedding here is infuriating. "Element chat" is a perfectly fine Google query. users being entitled primadonnas (sorry, I know that's hostile, but I think it's warranted) and expecting every software release to have Google/Facebook tier marketing effort behind them is the #1 problem in the adoption of decentralized platforms, and should be eradicated from civil discourse about internet infrastructure. just my two cents.]

Great name I'd say! If I would consider converting people like my parents to a new app, I'm sure Element has a bigger chance than Riot because of the connotations with the name of the latter.

Even as someone who has kind of been following along with Matrix development and this renaming thing, this post is really confusing.

If you go through a major rebrand, you've probably spent something like 1000 hours thinking about names and what they mean.

Your users haven't.

Get someone else to write the explanation of the rebrand. You can't do it yourself when you're too involved.

> We’re obviously aware that Element is (once again) both a dictionary word and a mathematical term.

and a ~30 year old, mainstream skateboard brand owned by the billion dollar, international Quiksilver company.

yep, that was the first thing that came to my mind

Also a chemistry term!

I don't care about SEO, but as an infrequent user I always liked that Riot was a snappy, two syllable, memorable name (I never forgot it). Synapse and Matrix are also easy for me to remember, I must add. I suspect I may forget Element--too close to a word I use every day (HTML elements, chemical elements, etc.) We'll see. Either way I expect I can get there by looking up "matrix client," of course.

EDIT: one -> two

Riot is two syllables.

Oh, sorry. I'm not a native english speaker.

One problem with "Element" is its potential for confusion with other, similarly-named tech products, such as:

- Adobe Photoshop Elements

- Adobe Premiere Elements

- Elementor, one of the more popular WordPress plugins

- Element UI, a Vue 2.0 based component library

- Elements XS, GIS-centric asset management software

There's even an IT company named Element Technologies: https://www.ele-ment.com/ (no affiliation).

There's also a prominent apparel/skateboarding company named Element which has been around for decades and is the top search result for "element" for me.

https://www.elementbrand.com/

I don't like the name because it is so generic and for me the word invokes no association with communication whatsoever.

I just think Element14. I agree with you, it is so generic as to be meaningless. Signal makes sense. iMessage & Facetime do what they say. Whatsapp at least sounds like a fun app even if the name is meaningless.

I think WhatsApp is a play on "What's Up" which actually makes a lot of sense given that's pretty much the point of a lot of casual conversation haha

I think of Element the skateboarding company

Same here.

How about another very generic and common word, “Apple.”

Except they were originally "Apple Computers" until they slowly gained enough recognition to rebrand to "Apple," plus that was in 1984, there wasn't an oversatuated market of other computer brands also called "Apple," unlike "Element" which has tons of existing tech-related and non–tech-related overlap and is generic on top of it.

On the thread 3 months ago for Launch HN: Riot (YC W20) - Phishing training for your team

> Hi Ben - cool product! Speaking as the lead for Riot.im, I would recommend picking another name asap, if nothing else because Riot Games has an awful lot of lawyers (as we know first hand, unfortunately).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677841

Then, 22 days ago, We’ve decided to rename riot

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611863

I know a couple other products/services named Element already... not that you have to worry about lawyering but it's pretty generic and doesn't sound like a messenger, sadly. Oh well, they are doing great work.

While a name change was a sensible move, I had very high hopes for them to choose a saner non-technical one with a more user-friendly focus, but this name sounds very generic and is more cryptic that "Signal".

They now have to do some serious SEO to be the first result on a Google search of "Element".

Sorry you don't like the name, hopefully it will grow on you.

On SEO, quoting from the post itself "We’re obviously aware that Element is (once again) both a dictionary word and a mathematical term - but in practice, looking at search results for Element right now, the top hits are for dictionary sites(!) and the field is wide open. Conversely, in a virgin browser on VPN, Riot is the 4th hit on Google for Riot; second only to a certain games company. In other words, we’ve shown that we can successfully adopt dictionary words - and if you do find yourself lost searching in a maze of mathematics, just throw in the word ‘chat’ to get back on track."

So yes there is a big SEO job ahead of us, we don't take anything for granted, but see a viable path to getting a good ranking.

Maybe your Google-Bubble is just broken? For me searching for Element brings up mostly companies and products which are using this name. Just a low number of results are dictionaries and knowledge-sites. Good luck competing with all of them.

Your first sentence makes no sense, given in the comment right above you (which is quoting the article) it points out that it was with a cookie-less browser and a VPN. You're far more likely to be the one who's bubbled in differently than your average person.

I still dont understand why Slack is popular when there is a free open source solution matrix/riot/element that works just as well.

Because normal people don’t care about open source and slack is cheap enough.

Sales and marketing. Also, the cost of Slack is insignificant to most companies and most others start by using the free tier, so the price isn't even a consideration.

The open source selling point is also irrelevant to most people outside of HN.

Stress on most in that, I found out about the name change due to actively rolling it out to replace slack.

Charging that sort of price for just chat felt wrong, so we transitioned to keep message history.

Even if you wanna still keep 'proprietary', there are better alternatives to Slack, like Discord.

I wouldn't call Discord "better" for enterprise. No SSO, bad uptime, no paid support, very few business-related third party integrations, and more.

Despite all of slacks flaws it still works better for most people IMO. I am very interested in matrix and personally use it, but there are a few areas where it is weaker to slack/discord.

1. Network effects. All your friends are already on slack/discord.

2. Difficulty to get started. Simply understanding what Matrix does, especially for someone non-technical, is more complex than setting up an entire slack workspace and inviting your friends.

3. Clients. While the slack client is a resource hog, for most people it is better than Riot/Element or other 3rd party options such as weechat.

I think all of these things are improving and Matrix absolutely will gain ground, but it will take time.

Slack and Matrix solve different problems. Slack is "a company wants it's employees and select outside parties to communicate with themselves." Matrix is "we want everyone to communicate with each other." A broader solution is almost always less efficient for a specific constrained sub-problem.

For example, a Slack instance can be configured to log every conversation (including DMs) for audit purposes by company admins. Matrix enforces e2e encryption for peer-to-peer conversations and I believe disabling room encryption requires code changes.

You can disable e2e on your server if you wish so. The option already exists in Synapse and it is part of Element Matrix Services customers.

For those who are legally required to be on record, there are other ways to keep track of the conversations for audit purposes without compromising the e2e encryption. For example, every room could have an audit bot invited by default, visible by the users, and which would record everything being said. Then you can setup the access to the logs from the audit bot to only be unencrypted in certain conditions, e.g. if the 2 halves of a key giving access to the account are put together. It's secure, clear for the users and legally compliant.

[disclaimer: I'm from the Element team]

Your comment reinforces my initial point: "A broader solution is almost always less efficient for a specific constrained sub-problem."

It all sounds very complicated compared to paying a bit of money and toggling a setting. For example, googling for "elements/riot/matrix audit bot" results in no pertinent results from what I can tell. Being possible is not the same thing as being easy to use.

edit: Also companies don't care about being clear to users except as legally required or beneficial to the company. Employees not being constantly aware that they're being watched all the time is a positive and not a negative.

never underestimate how many people will use something purely because it has a pretty UI :)

I use both Slack and Riot (in browser). Slack is slow, but it manages threading and notifications much better than Riot.

I want urgency hint set upon receiving new messages, and yes, desktop notifications. I am not sure what browsers do differently, but I use `dunst` notification daemon, and `notify-send` (and other programs) works well with it. I wish Riot (or Element) supported both. Of course only with with proper customizability.

I like what people are doing with Riot/Element/Matrix but it's still a bit janky. Half the chats I join are filled with messages about missing session keys.

So many of these comments just feel like bikeshedding.

By most arguments here basecamp is an awful name for a company and hey is a terrible name for an email application - it doesn't seem to be holding them back though.

For those not familiar with bikeshedding please see: http://bikeshed.com/

The bikeshedding is incredibly infuriating.

Probably the main problem with adoption of decentralized services is the overwhelming entitlement users feel to have everything delivered to them by megacorps.

Stop doing this!!! Stop being a whiny brat and think deeply about the trade-offs between centralized services and not having everything perfect right out of the gate. It's maddening.

I mean, the article is literally a press release about a name change. Of course the comments are going to be a discussion about the name change rather than anything more substantial about the product or business or underlying tech.

I speak English, but I can’t follow what this means:

> In fact we have simplified all our naming: Element is also the name for New Vector (the company behind Riot) while Modular, our flagship Matrix hosting service, has become Element Matrix Services.

Is New Vector now names Element, too? Or is this some sort of nickname? A doing business as name?

Riot -> Element

New Vector -> Element

Modular -> Element Matrix Services

(Although we haven't legally changed New Vector's name yet).

Do these people care about search results? With a name like that, most people will have a difficult time searching for element related stuff.

Well, quoting them:

> We’re obviously aware that Element is (once again) both a dictionary word and a mathematical term - but in practice, looking at search results for Element right now, the top hits are for dictionary sites(!) and the field is wide open.

I tried searching for Element in the Google Play store. It suggests an app dedicated to Asian gay men. The website directs to Riot.im.

From the article: > RiotX (our ground-up rewrite of Riot Android) has exited beta, and replaces Riot Android as Element

RiotX I can find/see, but it shows as a beta. It's not called Element.

I guess it's a slow rollout?

I used Riot ages ago, it was the suggested solution to have IRC on mobile. It wasn't that reliable plus it was crazy slow (search . They now suggest Rocket chat, it isn't slow but it doesn't do IRC. So now the community is divided across loads of platforms. There's also some web based things, e.g. Discourse, some still use mailing lists, etc. Plus things like Gitlab. It used to be much easier to follow things ("lurk").

I presume it's in the usual Google Play review queue still. (Welcome to Android development.)

The new app is with Google, we're just waiting on them and it will be live asap.

Folks on iOS can pick it up here https://apps.apple.com/app/vector/id1083446067

Will it be an update that replaces the current RiotX on my phone, or will I have to download it as a separate app?

It will replace the current Riot Android App. So if you are an early adopter of RiotX you will need to download the main app.

edit: commented before reading TFA, it'll probably be a new app.

Same for F-droid? I suppose I'll need to be testing the migration process again..

It doesn’t matter. For example, another very common dictionary word is “Apple“.

Sure, but Apple started before the internet (became big). When Google started, "Apple" probably brought up Apple Computers in the first few results.

Starting out with a common word that already has close to a billion results on Google requires a lot more effort.

I was never really aware of these products before, and I’m very interested! So I browsed over to the main site, found the pricing page and got this.

” We're busy building our pricing table & purchasing experience on mobile, for now please visit this page on your desktop.”

Um, what? I mean, I’m honestly more interested in self hosting, but this really seems like a good way to miss out on a lot of sales.

Won’t something simple suffice as a placeholder, until the larger ‘experience’ is finished? How many people have seen this when they aren’t near a desktop, only to never return?

Awesome! And now that RiotX is out of beta, please divert those resources to Element iOS because it _desperately_ needs some UX love.

The post references their new website [0] and talks about RiotX, their new website [1] however links to Riot.im [2], not RiotX [3], what to get?

Also, I have to set a password, but also a recovery password which should not be the same... Yet, I store them together in my KeepassXC db. Why would that be? Oh, now I run into a message key, the third to store in the same db entry :)

[0] https://element.io/

[1] https://element.io/get-started

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riot...

We are still in the review queue for Android. iOS folks can pick it up the Element release here https://apps.apple.com/app/vector/id1083446067

Ah, ok, I just entered the preview, I guess then I also get the latest greatest?

> Why would that be?

One password that you send to the server to authenticate. The other is a passphrase used to seed an encryption key for the data you store on the server securely in a manner the server has no access to.

Love the name. Simple, and is going to be pretty hard for society to attach negative connotations to it.

Elements are the flexible foundation of everything and in turn Element can be a flexible foundation for communication.

At the end of the day it boils down to getting control of a namespace and then owning it over time.

Slack and Apple have clearly shown this works just fine.

What I don't understand: 'Riot is now Element', yet when you click on 'Get Element' on the website and select the android app > 'Riot.im' by 'Vector Creations Limited' package name 'im.vector.app' IMHO if you rebrand it, everything should be in place.

Another post on the homepage now: "Element wins deal to supply half a million licences for German education system". I was going to point out that it's a pretty generic name being used by other groups, but when I read that linked article I see it's the same Element :-D

Just for fun: here's the City Barge pub in London mentioned in the blog post's UI screenshot. :)

https://www.timeout.com/london/bars-and-pubs/city-barge

PSA for all Riot/Element Android users: RiotX came out of beta too soon. Voice and video calls don't seem to be implemented in non-DM encrypted rooms. So if you created an e2e room and invited someone there, you can no longer call them.

It will be impossible to find on Google. Also, I'm wondering if it a good choice for such a project to use the hipster '.io' domain regarding the risk in a near future with this domain name.

Probably .im might not be available

Feel like I'm missing something important here. What's happening with .io?

Questionable governance : https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-produc...

In addition with management issue, the biggest issue/risk with .io is related to the fact the domain might have to come back Mauritius in a short term/few years as UK ownership of the related islands are unlawful: http://domainincite.com/24236-future-of-io-domains-has-becom...

Agree, it would of been better to focus on a name where getting the .com was feasible. At least element is better than riot.

Anybody who is questioning the need for the a name change in the first place should read up on the story of Piwik, Piwik Pro, and Matomo. Hostile forks are real, and they are fantastic messes.

Mumble has the same problem with Mumble com but the official one is Mumble.info.

Bravo i have to say. Riot was a really good name for a project in the post NSA/Snowden time, but since we already forgot that, Element is much more Acceptable for the big wash ;)

Can't connect to Element after logging in. Even old Riot.im stopped working properly. A pretty bumpy switch I suppose.

OK serious question perhaps someone connected to matrix / element will see this.

The name change from riot coincided with the murder of George Floyd and following surge unrest under the banner of Black Lives Matter. What's the teams position this, are they trying to distance themselves from the protests, if so why? If not, why?

Dunno elsewhere but in France pretty solid fist results on both Google and DDG referring to element hardware from matrix audio (founded 2009). Look like once a legal team enjoyed the fun of legal dispute they always ask for more...

https://www.matrix-digi.com

It looks like Riot.im accounts got forcible password change - at least I cannot login with my saved riot.im password to element.io

There is nothing of note there in my case, but resetting/changing password supposedly means loosing conversation history. Not good!

Nice, look forward to the web/desktop version! I think the name is fine, people will routinely use the new name in a few months time. Better to change the name now than 10 million users later.

The new site looks great, but the pricing page is a bit confusing.

Godspeed!

Now I wish Mattermost would become a Matrix client!

Not to be confused with element.ai

any plans to fix riot.imX beta on older android versions (5.X)? my friend can't even send messages (they are all just red) since some 0.9X version (not sure which exactly)

Didn't they just rename it from something else?

Riot, Slack, Discord, ... those names sound bad

So the game developer is now the Linux distro.

The distro I believe you're thinking of is "elementaryOS".

Discord is next.

Discord is a great name, why the will change it ?

Discord wants to attract communities beyond games (e.g. python developers). Their name means a disagreement between people. I think they will aim for a name more like "Discourse".

I think they'd have to change more than their name. The entire nomenclature of their app is gaming focused. That would also expose them to great risk of losing their core user base, at a time when another company Guilded has just launched a strictly gaming-focused chat app.

They've started to make changes, like changing their TLD from .gg to .com, and they removed the game store. They had a popup after a recent update describing the changes and why their doing it (to appeal to more than just gamers). I think that other than those bits of branding, it can be pretty gamer agnostic, though I haven't used it in a workplace to actually catch the inconsistencies.

> they removed the game store

seems like that might be because no one was playing? https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/13/20864278/discord-nitro-ga...

It certainly can be gamer-agnostic, but if they lose the gamer base, it could be significant for their success.

Slack and Discord are respectively references to the Church of the Subgenius and Discordianism. Obviously Riot/Matrix should have gone with something Flying Spaghetti Monster-related, maybe even working in how word "matrix" refers to the connection to a womb.

Is this not Riot Games?

Sometimes it feels like riot is being sabotaged from the inside.

Maybe they could have renamed it Agent Provocateur. Still a better name than Element.

I like it

Blog post: https://element.io/blog/welcome-to-element/

I couldn't find it when I initially posted this.

While I understand the change, it was definitely awkward timing given that I was championing a transition to Matrix. I've been encouraging my coworkers to download the client, and next thing I know the website has completely changed and they've removed the link to download the desktop client.

download links might still work. https://packages.riot.im/desktop/install/macos/Riot-1.6.8.dm...

We're just doing the desktop builds of Element now - you can grab the last release at https://riot.im/download/desktop, but the download link should be fixed shortly.

HN: It'd be cool to fix the submission to link to the https://element.io/blog/welcome-to-element/ rather just element.io for more context :)

Hey, firstly many thanks for championing Matrix.

We know that the name change will be disruptive in the short term and even tried to address this point in the blog specifically for people like yourself trying to fly the flag.

Further down the line we hope that rebranding will make such efforts easier since folks will not need to navigate Matrix vs Riot vs Modular vs New Vector maze (in addition to all the other excellent clients and hosting services out there).

Maybe they should have called it "Protest".

Speaking of names, I'm upset that the username I go by is taken. I'm echelon @ { gmail, HN, Twitter, Github, Gitlab, Square Cash, etc }, but found Riot / Matrix just a few months too late to get my username.

I'm not satisfied with the "just stand up your own server" response as an alternative.

I know it's cutting off my nose, but I've avoided using it because of this. I'm OCD about stupid usernames.

I wish unused usernames got garbage collected.

I really like how Discord handles usernames.

Well your username is made of a single common name existing in the dictionary, this situation was very predictable.

Matrix.org is just one of plenty of public homeservers if you don't want to host your own.

You can set your display name to whatever you like, and there are loads of other federated homeservers besides matrix.org.

Pick a more unique user name. echelonhelicopter, for example

I made up a name for an RPG character, and then started using it across the internet.

Then I found out that someone else had already made the name a few years before me and was already doing that.

Even unique names that aren't at all dictionary words are at risk of collision. I think the smarter tactic is to accept that you won't get that same nickname everywhere, and just have a few alternatives that you'll use if necessary. Complaining to the masses that a name is already taken isn't going to work.

Using another instance makes sense, since the official matrix.org instance is super slow and overloaded...

Brandon, why do you make it trivial to find your identity and trace your activities all across the internet? Consider using a different name everywhere for improved privacy.

I'm not trying to be anonymous.

I don't get why you are getting so many downvotes - perhaps offtopic?

Anyway: the lesson is that unless you own the top-level domain, you should never think of "your" name. Otherwise you are just getting different leases from different properties.

Do you want to be echelon? Register the domain (ideally on ENS, so that no government can take it away from you), adopt federated/decentralized services and push for adoption of OpenID/WebAuth.

echelon on IRC/Matrix and other open source mediums is a friend of mine. It is very much not an unused name.

It sounds like he registered the name on open source platforms and you used it on closed ones.

Interesting seeing worlds collide. One of you is going to need to change :)

You can set up your own server. Your name may be taken on @matrix.org but it'll be available @yourownserver.com.

I'm running my own Matrix server, and it federates nicely with other servers, so you're not losing anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com