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/
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.
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 :)
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).
We think Element has much broader appeal and really like the association with being the smallest indivisible unit.
> 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'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.
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.
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/)
They now have to do some serious SEO to be the first result on a Google search of "Element".
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.
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").
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.
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...).
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).
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.
Folks on iOS can pick it up here https://apps.apple.com/app/vector/id1083446067
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.
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...
EDIT: one -> two
> 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?
Though as Apple, Nike, Windows, Slack, Segment have shown, the generic approach can work.
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.
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.
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 :)
[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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
But to your point, the only good thing about Skype for example is few syllables and messaging related graphics/logo for me.
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).
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
I am very intetested in paying for the product you linked, so long as I don't need email. I will support your product, even with imperfections so long as you remain attentive to your user's needs (hopefully being a paid product helps in that area)
And for anyone else reading, I became an instant fan of matrix/riot/element because the only thing I needed to sign up to the matrix.org home server was username,password and pass a captcha! No email! Same with HN(minus captcha). If this wasn't but a petty annoyance compared to all the real problems of the world, I would be protesting and holding flag burnings with RFC2822 on the flag! (We all have pet peeves :) )
Starting out with a common word that already has close to a billion results on Google requires a lot more effort.
The new site looks great, but the pricing page is a bit confusing.
Godspeed!
You can invite other people to join the site, and yes, that is basically asking people to put an email address to notify your friends. I might implement later a referral/voucher system to make it easy to invite someone to join your paid contract without having to provide an email, but this is somewhat of a lower priority during the soft launch. Documentation and easier onboarding are definitely bigger tickets on my list.
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.
Still doesn't make any sense ...
The other two are meaningless, but at least monosyllabic - "I'll Skype you," "I'll Slack you," "I'll ... Element you?"
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
Not to take away from the tremendous work they're doing but that name really isn't good.
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/
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
Obviously Whatsapp had the advantage that its only competition in search results were typos and people mispelling whats up for comedic effect.
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.
” 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?
- ed: typo
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.
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).
So what is your point?
The open source selling point is also irrelevant to most people outside of HN.
What's next, an ITIL-enabled accounting system called 'IT'?
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.
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.
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://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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
Processing: https://processing.org/
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
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
> 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
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.
I guess in practice, for search purposes, we will see some kind of suffix attached to the name, Element Chat or similar.
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.
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
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W16qzZ7J5YQ
(Forgive me, it was still recent around here at the time the app got popular).
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
There is nothing of note there in my case, but resetting/changing password supposedly means loosing conversation history. Not good!
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;)
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 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.
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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.
And then there are the others [1].
1 https://twitter.com/KylePlantEmoji/status/122171379291396506...
