If I could wave a magic wand, formatting matrix usernames as “[email protected]” 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.

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 [email protected] (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 [email protected] if you drop the scheme prefix (as often happens), given there's zero reason why [email protected] on email should be configured to correctly route to the same entity as sip:[email protected] or xmpp:[email protected] - 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.

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.

(and I also think PicoTorrent will get more downloads because it's easier to Google for)

Such as thunderbird, icedove, mutt, gnus, mew, outlook, outlook express, etc?

Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail are email services first and foremost. Most native clients do not have mail in the name.

Yes, but mail isn't the same as SMTP or IMAP or POP.

In public communication, it almost never helps to start a sentence with "well, technically".

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".

Chat seems to be closest?

So MatrixChat might work?

Genuinely asking.

Well, that's only sensible—you're not sending an SMTP message. SMTP isn't a message format. It's a wire protocol for passing along pre-formatted messages. What you're sending is a MIME message, over SMTP. (Just like you send HTML over HTTP.)

The distinction is even clearer in the email case, actually, because those same MIME messages also show up in other transfer protocols (POP, IMAP.)

There are actually a few email clients that use "MIME" in their names. But it's pretty rare.

Conveniently, though, "MIME" is short for "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions", so "Mail" is actually in the name. ;)

Those get named after the overall framework (if they're not just named "fooVPN" or simply "foo") even though there's no single IPSec protocol, and many many different underlying protocols.

In English, the R makes for a good pun.

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

Only 2 problems in computer science I guess.

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.

If they had called FluffyMail they probably wouldn't be the juggernaut they are today.

Branding matters.