[rglullis]

My point (in relation to the top the of the thread I responded to) is that there are other things beyond the name that are more important/relevant when evaluating why the product wasn't successful.

If Scuttlebutt had an amazing feature that had a viral component to attract people, was easy to use and had no roadblocks for distribution, it would likely succeed, regardless of the name (like github).

But it's not. Scuttlebutt is a complex system, requires users to understand concepts like public keys and distributed systems, content discovery literally involves chasing other people around the internet to spread the gossip to you, the client was primitive, the development team had a size of one, etc, etc, etc... Those factors are way more relevant to understand why it hasn't taken off. Even if Scuttlebutt had a perfectly "appropriate" name, it wouldn't matter.

To put it another way: "Glimpse" is a fork of GIMP, and the author forked only because of the name. How many people actually cared enough about it to switch? How many people left Photoshop and started using "Glimpse" because that was the tipping point? Or the inverse: look at the whole Twitter -> X "branding". How many people left Twitter because of the name change vs because of the other changes since Elon took over?

[rzzzt]

How many people are calling the website X (and just X, no née-s and formerly known as-s)?

[rglullis]

That's a separate problem, but that also shows that names (good or bad) are not really a make-or-break attribute of a product.