Riot is now Element (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

On the other hand,

“Do you have Element?”

is less confusing than

“Do you have Signal?”

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

looking at you, git

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.

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

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)"

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 think those names are taken.

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

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

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'?

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.

slack is not very original if you think about it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Also on a company home/about page.

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

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 :)

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

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.

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

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.

Pick a more unique user name. echelonhelicopter, for example

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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;)

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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

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

Probably .im might not be available

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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

Also a chemistry term!

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

Riot is two syllables.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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 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.

Riot -> Element

New Vector -> Element

Modular -> Element Matrix Services

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

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

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

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