Riot is now Element

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.

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.

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.