7 ms·

To be clear: Riot's new name is not going to use the word Matrix - any more than Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge etc use the word "Web". Riot is just one client

To be clear: Riot's new name is not going to use the word Matrix - any more than Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge etc use the word "Web". Riot is just one client for Matrix, and it'd be completely unfair if it tried to hijack the name Matrix for its own purposes - and I'd hope that the Matrix.org Foundation would take steps to stop such a thing from happening. So I'm afraid the whole "Is that Matrix?", "Yes, I'm using FluffyChat/Riot/Whatever to connect to Matrix" conversation is still going to be there. Just like someone might say "ooh, what Web Browser is that?". This much is a feature, not a bug.

bhauer 6y ago
Indeed. I hope the name is somehow related to Matrix, however, so that the connection is a bit more obvious. Perhaps Transform or Neo.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Tragically most of those names have gone (e.g. https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/transform https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/transform) - and in the case of Neo, have gone many times over: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/neo https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/neo, https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/nio https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/nio, https://matrix.org/docs/projects/sdk/matrix-nio https://matrix.org/docs/projects/sdk/matrix-nio, etc :D
  - Markoff 6y ago
    that's no reason why it could not be again reused
    - opan 6y ago
      Name collision in general is not good, but also in this specific case they've had issues being confused with the game company called Riot, so I can't imagine they would want to go with an already-used name again if they could help it.
- dijit 6y ago
  Neo would be. Eh. Weird. There are decent terms in the screenplay of the Matrix movie to draw from. Despite nobody being able to spell most of them, the ship names would be good. Nebuchadnezzar, Logos, Icarus etc.[0] There’s also other terms such as “construct” (the local Matrix instance /site before you enter the real matrix) [0]: https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_hovercraft https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_hovercraft
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    Most of them have gone already - e.g. https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb was the first ever Matrix Bot, and https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct is a C++ homeserver...
    - dijit 6y ago
      Well, poop. Only 2 problems in computer science I guess.
      - moehm 6y ago
        Naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors?
        dijit 6y ago
        bingo
  - rakoo 6y ago
    I would love to be able to say "I use Nebuchadnezzar to navigate Matrix".
  - dkudriavtsev 6y ago
    I use neo as the hostname of my Matrix server.
- numpad0 6y ago
  What about phone-related names: "Protocol 8110" "Model 1500" "Project Landline" etc.
- _hardwaregeek 6y ago
  Could use some linear algebra terms. Pivot? Eigen? Nullspace? Kernel? Determinant? Trace?
  - edoceo 6y ago
    I think Kernel is already taken
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
skrebbel 6y ago
That seems like a missed opportunity. If you're renaming anyway, why not make it easier for people to understand what's going on? I mean I don't think the browser analogy is that great, it seems more the exception than the rule. Eg most IRC clients have the word IRC in them, or something very close (eg mIRC, irssi, etc). Most email clients have the word "mail" in them. Torrent clients, same. Why shouldn't a Matrix client have the word Matrix in it? Just call it iMatrix or uMatrix or something like that, and you're removing a lot of confusion. If mIRC and uTorrent and Gmail can get away with that, so can you.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  >Most email clients have the word "mail" in them. Yes, but mail isn't the same as SMTP or IMAP or POP.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    When I speak about email, I don't say "I'm sending you an SMTP message". I say "I'm sending you an email (message)". For all intents and purposes (besides writing code involving these protocols), the name of the protocol is "email". In public communication, it almost never helps to start a sentence with "well, technically".
    - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
      What I mean is that "mail" was a thing before email protocols existed. "Mail" and even "email" has meaning beyond any specific technology. The name told you what you could expect the technology to do. That's why it made sense to include these words in the name of email clients. The same is not true for "Matrix".
      - jacobr1 6y ago
        What is the equivalent? One of these: instant messaging, group messaging, teamware, groupware, team chat, group chat ... ? Chat seems to be closest? So MatrixChat might work? Genuinely asking.
hyakosm 6y ago
It's not the same context, not the same scale and not the same times. It should be pertinent to have a client name reflecting the proximity with the protocol.
gorgoiler 6y ago
I think this feels disappointing because you’re saying that my anecdotal evidence — that the matrix ecology of proper nouns is confusing to newcomers — doesn’t bear true in the wider world. That feels surprising to me. If I could wave a magic wand, formatting matrix usernames as “alice@alice.com” instead of “@alice:alice.com” feels like a similar opportunity to make things more friendly to newcomers. It’s these little things that make a huge difference to success. TL=com/ORG=ycombinator/HOST=news addressing vs news.ycombinator.com. Or calling Outlook an “MUA” instead of just saying it’s a “mail client”. It’s technically correct. Some people say that technically correct is the best kind of correct, but often it feels like the most convincing strategy is the one where you don’t need to add explanation or bon mots to win over opinion — people can just see it’s right. I’m surprised that Matrix didn’t think they would benefit from trying to become well known as Matrix first, then diversify into FluffyChat etc second.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  I totally agree that at first it's confusing that Matrix the protocol has different clients, with unrelated names like Riot/FluffyChat/Nheko/Ditto etc. However, I really think this is unavoidable, just as it is with the Web, Email, IRC, XMPP, NNTP, whatever. And just as it would be incredibly arrogant and bad form and confusing for any of those projects to call themselves "Web browser" or "XMPP chat" or "Usenet" or "Mail client", the same is true for Matrix. Yes, it's more cognitive load than a system like Slack or Discord where there's one official client which bears the same name as the service, but it's a fundamentally different beast. In terms of Matrix IDs, we very very deliberately made up the @user:example.com format to avoid folks ever confusing them with email addresses like user@example.com (and to hint at a federated form of @mention notation, a bit like ActivityPub subsequently did). We find it super confusing that SIP URIs and JIDs look like user@example.com if you drop the scheme prefix (as often happens), given there's zero reason why user@example.com on email should be configured to correctly route to the same entity as sip:user@example.com or xmpp:user@example.com - and in fact the chance of it working in the general case are incredibly low (thanks to aliases, filters, routing rules, etc). That said, we do not expect Matrix IDs to be used in the general case - we've always wanted people to discover each other based on their existing identifiers (email, phone number, etc). In practice this hasn't gone smoothly as nobody has properly solved decentralised identity (or if they have, they haven't hooked it up to Matrix yet), so we're in a bit of a limbo. But the solution is definitely not to make Matrix IDs look like email addresses. So, my point here is that this is not "technically correct is the best kind of correct". If we renamed Riot to be "Matrix Client" we'd be quite rightly crucified by every other Matrix client developer out there. Just like Mozilla would if they renamed Firefox to be "Web browser" (even though they were effectively responsible for the modern web browser as Netscape). However, we absolutely have made things even more unnecessarily complicated by maintaining separate brands for Riot, Modular and New Vector, hence consolidating them together. But we simply can't get away from the fact that the end result will be a Matrix client, not the Matrix client.
Nuzzerino 6y ago
Wasn't one of the original Web browsers named as "World Wide Web"? So the analogy doesn't seem appropriate here.
- tdeck 6y ago
  The original Web browser was named WorldWideWeb; that's where the name for the web (and our WWW prefix) come from.
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    Yes, the first web browser was WorldWideWeb. one of the first mail clients was /bin/mail. the first IRC client was irc. the first jabber server was jabberd. And the first Matrix client was called Matrix Console. Much like all of the above, it sucked - it was a first generation thing I wrote in Angular on the Caltrain the day before we launched Matrix at TC Disrupt 2014. So I'd say the analogy is pretty good. Riot (originally Vector) is a second gen client designed to make Matrix mass market - just like Netscape did for the Web. You can get away with the first crappy experiment being named after the protocol, but beyond that point it's just gauche.
dcposch 6y ago
Notice how Gmail sounds almost exactly like Email. If they had called FluffyMail they probably wouldn't be the juggernaut they are today. Branding matters.

bhauer 6y ago

Indeed. I hope the name is somehow related to Matrix, however, so that the connection is a bit more obvious. Perhaps Transform or Neo.

Arathorn 6y ago
Tragically most of those names have gone (e.g. https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/transform https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/transform) - and in the case of Neo, have gone many times over: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/neo https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/neo, https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/nio https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/nio, https://matrix.org/docs/projects/sdk/matrix-nio https://matrix.org/docs/projects/sdk/matrix-nio, etc :D
- Markoff 6y ago
  that's no reason why it could not be again reused
  - opan 6y ago
    Name collision in general is not good, but also in this specific case they've had issues being confused with the game company called Riot, so I can't imagine they would want to go with an already-used name again if they could help it.
dijit 6y ago
Neo would be. Eh. Weird. There are decent terms in the screenplay of the Matrix movie to draw from. Despite nobody being able to spell most of them, the ship names would be good. Nebuchadnezzar, Logos, Icarus etc.[0] There’s also other terms such as “construct” (the local Matrix instance /site before you enter the real matrix) [0]: https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_hovercraft https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_hovercraft
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Most of them have gone already - e.g. https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb was the first ever Matrix Bot, and https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct is a C++ homeserver...
  - dijit 6y ago
    Well, poop. Only 2 problems in computer science I guess.
    - moehm 6y ago
      Naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors?
      - dijit 6y ago
        bingo
- rakoo 6y ago
  I would love to be able to say "I use Nebuchadnezzar to navigate Matrix".
- dkudriavtsev 6y ago
  I use neo as the hostname of my Matrix server.
numpad0 6y ago
What about phone-related names: "Protocol 8110" "Model 1500" "Project Landline" etc.
_hardwaregeek 6y ago
Could use some linear algebra terms. Pivot? Eigen? Nullspace? Kernel? Determinant? Trace?
- edoceo 6y ago
  I think Kernel is already taken
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

skrebbel 6y ago

That seems like a missed opportunity. If you're renaming anyway, why not make it easier for people to understand what's going on? I mean I don't think the browser analogy is that great, it seems more the exception than the rule. Eg most IRC clients have the word IRC in them, or something very close (eg mIRC, irssi, etc). Most email clients have the word "mail" in them. Torrent clients, same. Why shouldn't a Matrix client have the word Matrix in it? Just call it iMatrix or uMatrix or something like that, and you're removing a lot of confusion. If mIRC and uTorrent and Gmail can get away with that, so can you.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago
>Most email clients have the word "mail" in them. Yes, but mail isn't the same as SMTP or IMAP or POP.
- majewsky 6y ago
  When I speak about email, I don't say "I'm sending you an SMTP message". I say "I'm sending you an email (message)". For all intents and purposes (besides writing code involving these protocols), the name of the protocol is "email". In public communication, it almost never helps to start a sentence with "well, technically".
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    What I mean is that "mail" was a thing before email protocols existed. "Mail" and even "email" has meaning beyond any specific technology. The name told you what you could expect the technology to do. That's why it made sense to include these words in the name of email clients. The same is not true for "Matrix".
    - jacobr1 6y ago
      What is the equivalent? One of these: instant messaging, group messaging, teamware, groupware, team chat, group chat ... ? Chat seems to be closest? So MatrixChat might work? Genuinely asking.

hyakosm 6y ago

It's not the same context, not the same scale and not the same times. It should be pertinent to have a client name reflecting the proximity with the protocol.

gorgoiler 6y ago

I think this feels disappointing because you’re saying that my anecdotal evidence — that the matrix ecology of proper nouns is confusing to newcomers — doesn’t bear true in the wider world. That feels surprising to me. If I could wave a magic wand, formatting matrix usernames as “alice@alice.com” instead of “@alice:alice.com” feels like a similar opportunity to make things more friendly to newcomers. It’s these little things that make a huge difference to success. TL=com/ORG=ycombinator/HOST=news addressing vs news.ycombinator.com. Or calling Outlook an “MUA” instead of just saying it’s a “mail client”. It’s technically correct. Some people say that technically correct is the best kind of correct, but often it feels like the most convincing strategy is the one where you don’t need to add explanation or bon mots to win over opinion — people can just see it’s right. I’m surprised that Matrix didn’t think they would benefit from trying to become well known as Matrix first, then diversify into FluffyChat etc second.

Arathorn 6y ago
I totally agree that at first it's confusing that Matrix the protocol has different clients, with unrelated names like Riot/FluffyChat/Nheko/Ditto etc. However, I really think this is unavoidable, just as it is with the Web, Email, IRC, XMPP, NNTP, whatever. And just as it would be incredibly arrogant and bad form and confusing for any of those projects to call themselves "Web browser" or "XMPP chat" or "Usenet" or "Mail client", the same is true for Matrix. Yes, it's more cognitive load than a system like Slack or Discord where there's one official client which bears the same name as the service, but it's a fundamentally different beast. In terms of Matrix IDs, we very very deliberately made up the @user:example.com format to avoid folks ever confusing them with email addresses like user@example.com (and to hint at a federated form of @mention notation, a bit like ActivityPub subsequently did). We find it super confusing that SIP URIs and JIDs look like user@example.com if you drop the scheme prefix (as often happens), given there's zero reason why user@example.com on email should be configured to correctly route to the same entity as sip:user@example.com or xmpp:user@example.com - and in fact the chance of it working in the general case are incredibly low (thanks to aliases, filters, routing rules, etc). That said, we do not expect Matrix IDs to be used in the general case - we've always wanted people to discover each other based on their existing identifiers (email, phone number, etc). In practice this hasn't gone smoothly as nobody has properly solved decentralised identity (or if they have, they haven't hooked it up to Matrix yet), so we're in a bit of a limbo. But the solution is definitely not to make Matrix IDs look like email addresses. So, my point here is that this is not "technically correct is the best kind of correct". If we renamed Riot to be "Matrix Client" we'd be quite rightly crucified by every other Matrix client developer out there. Just like Mozilla would if they renamed Firefox to be "Web browser" (even though they were effectively responsible for the modern web browser as Netscape). However, we absolutely have made things even more unnecessarily complicated by maintaining separate brands for Riot, Modular and New Vector, hence consolidating them together. But we simply can't get away from the fact that the end result will be a Matrix client, not the Matrix client.

Nuzzerino 6y ago

Wasn't one of the original Web browsers named as "World Wide Web"? So the analogy doesn't seem appropriate here.

tdeck 6y ago
The original Web browser was named WorldWideWeb; that's where the name for the web (and our WWW prefix) come from.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Yes, the first web browser was WorldWideWeb. one of the first mail clients was /bin/mail. the first IRC client was irc. the first jabber server was jabberd. And the first Matrix client was called Matrix Console. Much like all of the above, it sucked - it was a first generation thing I wrote in Angular on the Caltrain the day before we launched Matrix at TC Disrupt 2014. So I'd say the analogy is pretty good. Riot (originally Vector) is a second gen client designed to make Matrix mass market - just like Netscape did for the Web. You can get away with the first crappy experiment being named after the protocol, but beyond that point it's just gauche.

dcposch 6y ago

Notice how Gmail sounds almost exactly like Email. If they had called FluffyMail they probably wouldn't be the juggernaut they are today. Branding matters.