We think Element has much broader appeal and really like the association with being the smallest indivisible unit.
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.
Still doesn't make any sense ...
Plenty of popular tools with questionable names. Splunk and slack comes to mind.
Roach could be a last name, or a type of chocolate...
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.
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/)
It's important to everyone, whether they realize it or not.
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.
Sounds malicious.
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).