11 ms·

Zulip Server 1.9: HipChat import and much more

329 points by rishig 8y ago

jsiepkes 8y ago
I've said it before (so at the risk of annoying people ;-) I can highly recommend Zulip. We briefly used Mattermost (couple of months) before realising the Zulip threading model was a way better fit for us then what Mattermost offered. It might feel a bit odd in the beginning but after you've become accustomed with it you'll love it!
msie 8y ago
The one good thing about not having an on-prem Slack is communications after your company network goes down.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jfrankamp 8y ago
  And the same in reverse is true, our comm channel has gone out several times due to slack being out of our control and going down. IMO this is a wash.
- borski 8y ago
  The one good thing about having an on-prem Slack is communications after the Slack network goes down.
  - qiushihe 8y ago
    That's why you should run both.
    - bachmeier 8y ago
      Or print out all your conversations.
tedmiston 8y ago
It's pretty cool that he included the output of git shortlog -ns in the release announcement.
- amdelamar 8y ago
  I liked that too. But I prefer to hide merge commits using: git shortlog -sn --no-merges
  - tabbott 8y ago
    Zulip has a rebase-based development workflow and doesn't use merge commits because in my experience, it produces a much more readable commit history (which is really important for understanding historical changes). We've been very happy with this approach. Some relevant reading on our version control approach for those who might be interested: * https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/git/overview.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/git/overview.html * https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/version-control.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/version-...
    - jtchang 8y ago
      Doesn't using rebase generally mean you have to rebase on top of master and thus with your local branch you may need to git push --force ?
      - tabbott 8y ago
        Yes. The default GitHub-recommended workflow of having contributors do `git pull` to integrate their changes an easily result in a confusing spaghetti monster history even if the contributor only has 1-2 commits that don't merge conflict with anything. For this reason, most major open source projects use that part of the workflow (asking their contributors to rebase their PRs on top of master and never use `git pull --merge`), even if they plan to merge the commits into master via a merge commit. (The Git documentation is very aggressive in discouraging force-pushing of commits, but that advice is intended for a public repository, like the main zulip.git repository, that others might pull from. Obviously, we don't force-push to zulip.git, but if you're using Git right, you should be force-pushing to your fork when you fix a typo in one of your commits.)
mahesh_rm 8y ago
Anybody knows why this over rocketchat?
- demonshreder 8y ago
  Zulip has a thread based Instant messaging model which helps facilitate multiple different conversations in the same channel without losing track / context. More on their homepage - https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/
  - jfrankamp 8y ago
    What is the advantage of threads over just more specific top level channels. e.g. in their example why not #annual-summit-name-tags etc. One immediate thing slack does wrong is it makes channels too hard to make and destroy and leave and join, but if that was fixed... What is the advantage of the nesting?
    - aidenn0 8y ago
      zulip ends up being a bit like e-mail where you can add people to threads and they immediately have the history. I've used mattermost, not slack, but that basic model fixes a lot of issues I have with mattermost.
      - jfrankamp 8y ago
        A more specific slack channel (and I assume mattermost channel) is a thread that you can add people to any time and they will immediately have history. Or put in the inverse, a Zulip thread that is too general is a channel with information overload and becomes useless. Does the nesting have intrinsic value over simply more top level channels?
        aidenn0 8y ago
        Mattermost has threads inside channels as well, but they end up underused since posts need not be to any specific thread. The idea is you subscribe to a channel, but then any post to the channel needs to also have some sort of logical subject.
thenaturalist 8y ago
Title is somehow linking to the blog instead of the actual product page (https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com).
- Mononokay 8y ago
  Because it's an announcement of a new version. Not that hard to figure out.
zafiro17 8y ago
I'd looked into Zulip a few months ago when it appeared on HN and it looks great to me. But this announcement mentions a new beta terminal client! That seals the deal for me! Love the idea of Zulip on a terminal: too good to be true for my organization at least.
raphlinus 8y ago
We've been using Zulip for just over a week in xi-editor and related projects, and I'm thrilled. Huge improvement over the pastiche of IRC and Reddit we were using before.
- tabbott 8y ago
  Zulip founder here; I should add that Zulip hosting is free for open source projects: https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/ https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/. A bunch of other cool open source projects use it, including Python Core, parts of the Rust community, MariaDB, Coala, the Lean Theorem Prover, the HL7 standard, and many more.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    How do you get the standard plan for an open source project? I don't see anything on that page or anywhere else, should we email the team for the bump?
    - raphlinus 8y ago
      "Just contact sales@zulipchat.com and we’d be happy to discuss your situation!" (https://zulipchat.com/plans/ https://zulipchat.com/plans/) That's what I did. Thanks again to them, I really appreciate it.
- chubot 8y ago
  I'm also using Zulip for Oil [1] and like it a lot :) Reddit was OK for awhile... I dislike the redesign because there are bugs with code formatting, and because the latency is worse. And it seems like they couldn't really make up their mind visually. Actually Zulip is one of the lowest latency web apps I've used in recent memory! I also have problems following IRC because of the lack of threading. [1] https://www.oilshell.org https://www.oilshell.org
- michaelchris 8y ago
  Do you have any links you could share? Or are you using zulip for internal comms only?
detaro 8y ago
last large discussion of Zulip (6 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675
Polyisoprene 8y ago
We looked at it briefly, but the number of components make it look more of a tech demo than a product meant to be installed on-prem. Redis, Postgres, Rabbitmq and Memcached just to run a chat?
- hobbescotch 8y ago
  This would certainly make it easier https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/master/docker-compose.yml https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/master/docker-com...
  - Polyisoprene 8y ago
    Well, it’s not fewer components regardless how you package it. Running docker compose wasn’t enough to get into a fully configured system to be able to evaluate it even.
    - seedie 8y ago
      Do you remember the problems you ran into? I'm evaluating zulip with the help of the docker container (1.9.0-rc2) at the moment and docker-compose was enough to get it running.
      - Polyisoprene 8y ago
        Unfortunately not. It was a while ago, so I might have been unlucky with the version I tried. I believe after half a day of struggling to get it working, I got to the point where I was required to setup an organization or something like that and quit at that point and spent some time trying to remove everything.
- TheDong 8y ago
  > more of a tech demo than a product It is neither a tech demo nor a product, it is a mature open source project. In fact, in my mind tech demos tend towards having fewer mature components. > Redis, Postgres, Rabbitmq and Memcached just to run a chat That set of dependencies seems quite normal to me for a mature project. Mastodon (the most popular open-source-twitterish-thing) has a similar set of dependencies, and is also effectively just chat as you say. Discourse, a popular open source forum, is also basically just chat, and has a similar set of dependencies. In the case of zulip, you can even use a hosted version and avoid running anything yourself. I don't understand why its totally normal set of dependencies turns you off so harshly. I'll happily take a project using redis/postgresql/etc instead of trying to build its own versions of those baked into the binary because components like postgres/redis/etc have great documentation, tooling for metrics and monitoring, etc... If the project bakes its own stuff in itself to avoid taking on dependencies, I doubt it will either be as good or as easy to manage.
devy 8y ago
New to Zulip. So is it sponsored by Dropbox now after acquisition of Zulip Inc.? On the bottom of the page, it reads: Tim Abbott is the lead developer of the Zulip open source project. He previously was CTO of Ksplice and then Zulip Inc. (before it was acquired by Dropbox).
- guessmyname 8y ago
  The acquisition happened 5+ years ago. Here’s an Techcrunch article from Mar 17, 2014 [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-stealthy-workplace-chat-solution-still-in-private-beta/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-s...
- nicholasjbs 8y ago
  As far as I know Dropbox has no connection to Zulip now. Zulip was initially started as a company, which was acquired by Dropbox several years ago. Dropbox open sourced the code, and Tim (one of the Zulip cofounders) later left Dropbox to focus on running Zulip as an open source project.
- tabbott 8y ago
  Yikes, we haven't updated my blog bio in a while. Fixed to remove the confusing reference to Dropbox (which no longer has any formal involvement in Zulip); http://zulipchat.com/history http://zulipchat.com/history has further context for anyone curious.
Jumziey 8y ago
Whaaat!? I who always thought irc was the on-prem Slack alternative. Its a pretty cool thing that recently got created (around 1988). Try it out! Will blow you mind straight out of the water tbh. There's even some public chat rooms you can hang around in.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  IRC: No code-block formatting. Can't even receive messages when you're offline, out of the box. No message delete/edit. No built-in file hosting, must upload elsewhere and link it. No drag-and-drop. No real ergonomics in general. Way behind on community-building/-management features. Only particularly liked by the sort of person who considers tweaking their .conkyrc as a Friday well-spent. I hang out on freenode every day. But I have higher expectations of chat in 2018 when it comes to what I would choose for an actual organization. So does everyone else. IRC isn't blowing anyone's mind. Especially that first time they try to reply to someone but their message is never received because the other person closed their laptop.
Hydraulix989 8y ago
I also recommend RocketChat https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/
- tibu 8y ago
  Rocketchat or Zulip? Did somebody try maybe both?
  - omnimus 8y ago
    I did. Also mattermost and matrix. Few years ago. Ended up with matrix instance. But it really depends on specific scale and usecase. From what i remember - Rocketchat was based on meteor, which seemed dying at the time + it was computing hungry and clients were especially hungry. - Mattermost worked for a time but you were not able to get mobile notifications without paying for license (not sure about now). Sounds suprising but it was just problem. - Zullip too many dependencies and complicated install. Matrix is more of a standard than anything. The first server implementation is called Matrix Synapse written in python twisted. I had it running without issues on 512mb vps for 30 people org with SQLITE. When you need bigger scale Matrix has some go and rust server implementations, you can also use postgres etc. I guess you should start with what scale you need and what features you need and go from there.
    - sandGorgon 8y ago
      So the matrix guys created a new product/company called https://www.modular.im https://www.modular.im It's basically hosted Slack-using-riotchat/matrix. Very cheap too. Most of the other open source providers (incl Zulip and Mattermost) almost cost the same as slack.
    - vesak 8y ago
      > When you need bigger scale Matrix has some go and rust server implementations, you can also use postgres etc. Only Synapse is usable though. Dendrite (Go+Kafka) is getting there, but Ruma (Rust) seems to have been stalled waiting for the programming language to stabilize.
kossmoboleat 8y ago
How well does the Hangouts integration work? I found it involved too many steps when using Hangouts in Slack
- tabbott 8y ago
  It's pretty simple: There's a button you can click at the bottom of the compose box that generates a new Hangouts video chat link; once oyu send your message, users can click the link to join.
- mikewhy 8y ago
  > too many steps when using Hangouts in Slack What are the steps involved? For us, it's "tap the phone icon in the top right".
jimmy1 8y ago
I mistakenly assumed there wasn't a paid offering. So it's becoming clear that the only revenue model going forward is open core model.
- rishig 8y ago
  Zulip supports itself by selling hosting (at zulipchat.com) and support contracts for on-prem installations. Everything is a part of the open source project; no proprietary add-ons.
- exabrial 8y ago
  They have that?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- wmf 8y ago
  It looks like the paid edition of Zulip is the same as the open source version so it's not open core. Of course if Zulip becomes too popular then we may see AWS GroupChat followed by a license change...
  - bradknowles 8y ago
    AWS already has Chime. They don’t need anything else.
nicholasjbs 8y ago
We (the Recurse Center) have been using Zulip since early 2013, and it is the core of our online community. Zulip is excellent both for small teams (we use it for our team of 7) and big groups - we also run a realm with over 1,000 users posting 10s of thousands of messages monthly. I can't recommend it highly enough.
- erinnh 8y ago
  How do you handle high availability for Zulip? Last I looked that was a problem for it.
  - nicholasjbs 8y ago
    We don't run our own instance; we're hosted by zulipchat.com. Perfect uptime isn't a priority for us, so I don't know what (if any) availability they promise. But we've had almost no downtime over the past five years, and we've certainly had less than the public Slack outages I've seen folks talking about on Twitter :)
  - tabbott 8y ago
    Zulip founder here. It's definitely possible to run a Zulip server with essentially no downtime. E.g. the main zulipchat.com service has had approximately 10 user-facing outages with a median duration of 5-10 minutes over the last 5 years (there was one while we still only had a few hundred users that lasted overnight), most of them in the middle of the night. Happy to talk more about this for anyone curious; there are some fun stories (like migrating from MySQL to Postgres as our primary database technology with <30 minutes of downtime early in its development). We don't have a public uptime SLA for zulipchat.com uptime yet, but we're happy to make them for individual customers (and I suppose we should add one). If you're self-hosting, our commercial support offerings will help you setup your servers in a way that achieves your uptime goals; because Zulip is so stable, usually folks just go with a hot spare (our enterprise customers generally only report downtime related to server upgrades, which is usually avoidable).
woolvalley 8y ago
How does it compare to mattermost?
- sien 8y ago
  Exactly. We're looking at paying for Slack and mattermost seems to offer most of what Slack does and is something that would be pretty easy to run. It's slick. Well documented and installs nicely in a container. Has anyone here used Mattermost? https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
  - meritt 8y ago
    We've been using Mattermost (I have not used Zulip but it looks superb) for about a year. The UI/UX of the desktop and mobile apps is a bit kludgy but functionally it was a breeze to setup, runs on a very low-cost instance, and has had 100% uptime. And most importantly, we're in control of our data unlike cloud-only offerings.
  - tiles 8y ago
    Have you tried out Zulip? You may find the user experience pretty compelling. It's an entire alternative interface to the slack or IRC-style of chatrooms, and it's OSS and documents how to make it containerized.
    - sien 8y ago
      Not yet. Both mattermost and zulip look well worth it for saving quite a bit of money over slack for a fair sized company though. The responses from people here are really interesting.
  - seedie 8y ago
    Not sure if this helps, but we were evaluating Mattermost and are still evaluating Zulip at the moment. Our users pretty fast had a tendency towards Zulip, while I've had a slight preference for Mattermost from a ops view. We only have/had a short eval phase and our use case is a small raceengineering team with 40 people at the racetrack, independent of internet access. So a very particualar use case, and our needs might not cover you needs. Zulip pro * Threading model (can't value that high enough) * All messages overview, no matter what stream they were written in * Zulip community at chat.zulip.org with direct contact to the devs. Tim Abbott the lead dev helped me out in a issue with a user login (haven't used the Mattermost support so can't compare) Zulip con * Most ops work has to be done by a python script manage.py, API has room to improve Mattermost pro * API * haven't measured but the UI felt smoother, faster Mattermost con * you have to pay for Enterprise features Both have great docs and a docker deployment
grizzles 8y ago
Judging from the zulip.org server it looks like there is a need for a chronological topic decay feature.
- tabbott 8y ago
  Zulip founder here; I'm curious why you think that? Here's our thinking. Topics within a stream are ordered by the time of the most recent message. We keep the complete history, both of messages and topics, because it's useful for search and following up on things. Personally, I regularly reply to a conversation whose last message was a month or more ago to follow up with new information (often after getting there from one of the permanent links in our issue tracker). Because the context is all there and available with just a single click on the topic, I find it to be a really nice workflow.
  - grizzles 8y ago
    The list of topics is too long to scroll through. For example, under general on zulip.org. A better UI would be if it just showed a few that it thought you might be interested in, and had autocomplete-type search for others.
    - tabbott 8y ago
      I agree that the "more topics" thing takes up too much vertical space after just one click to see deeper history. We actually just had a discussion of it last week; the issue created from that is here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/10786 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/10786
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Hi there! I just started using Zulip (first-time user) looking forward to migrate off Slack and unfortunately I've been really disappointed. In Slack I can just load the website and begin typing into whatever channel I'm at (or use 1 click to select the right one if it's not the current one). In Zulip, it seems there's been a deliberately goal of explicitly designing it to be excruciating painful. For some reason Enter doesn't work by default (in which chat system is Enter an unfamiliar command for sending?!), and then I always have to press 'R' or click something to reply to (which often takes multiple clicks and several seconds)... why make things deliberately complicated/painful without even an option to turn off this 'feature'?
mxuribe 8y ago
I'm a matrix - really via riot client - user, but never used zulip...Can anyone cite 1 or 2 big benefits of using zulip over matrix clients? I'm genuinely curious.
- mockingbirdy 8y ago
  https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ For me it's Zulip Topics - they make it very easy to organize the communication. You have channels and they contain topics. This is one of the most useful features of Zulip. Most features of all chat clients (riot, slack, mattermost, rocket.chat, zulip) are pretty similar.
shin_lao 8y ago
We are heavy Slack users. We tried Zulip. No one in the team liked the ergonomics of Zulip and how difficult it was to integrate. Just for threaded discussions we felt the switch was not worth it. It didn't stick and we stayed in Slack.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Might want to look at https://twist.com/home https://twist.com/home It seems a bit like a slakey zulip to me, though I haven’t had opportunity to use it yet.
  - zingmars 8y ago
    No self hosted option :(
amelius 8y ago
As someone who follows technology closely, I find it a bit frustrating that chat is making such little progress, and that for our communication we've essentially moved from federated email to silo-based chat solutions (which is hardly a feature), and lock-in that comes with these. How is "IT" going to save the world if we get stuck like this as a profession? I suspect one problem is that at universities there is no credit to be earned from coming up with a chat protocol that can serve us the coming decades, and hence we're stuck with solutions from corporations and their inherent problems ... But of course that's not to say that there is anything wrong with the quality of the product being promoted here.
- brylie 8y ago
  For what it's worth, Zulip is one of a few projects to support federated chat. From the linked document: "Zulip now has an IRC bridge powered by matrix.org"
  - amelius 8y ago
    Yes, they probably support email as well, that's not the point. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... (not saying this is the case here, just that it shouldn't be a concern)
rob-olmos 8y ago
If anyone has tried G Suite Chat, it looks like they've added "threads" at some recent point but the UX has some ways to go.
abraae 8y ago
I love Zulip and wish it the best. But this comment on the zuplipchat web site https://zulipchat.com/security/ https://zulipchat.com/security/ feels like a pretty gross generalisation and detracts from Zulip's vibe IMO: > With many SaaS providers, essentially all engineers have direct shell access to production servers storing user data. Zulip Cloud is different: only a small handful of security-trained engineers have access to production servers or to sensitive customer data.
- tabbott 8y ago
  Yikes, I'm not sure how "essentially all" ever got in there; it should have been "the majority of". And even with that edit, our practice is, where possible, to cite sources, and while there's a lot of anecdotal data on this topic, there aren't great published sources for this topic. So whether or not it's shockingly common for companies to have dozens or hundreds of people with shell access to production, we've removed the commentary on what other organizations do here, and just explain our practices. I really appreciate the feedback!
hiisukun 8y ago
I'd love to set this up at my part time workplace, but it's a forensics shop where the network is offline, and doesn't have email. Team is small (<20) so manual accounts would be fine. Am I reading the docs correctly in that email is absolutely required? I haven't checked thoroughly for this new release, but previously it was for missed message notification as well as account creation, if I'm remembering right. It's not a for profit place, so I'm simply looking to self host, sans email, to make communication easier across the teams. Current solution is definitely inferior to Zulip!
- tabbott 8y ago
  We support this, it's just enough of a corner case that it's not well documented. If you don't care about missed-message emails, you can install the Docker image (easiest to setup when offline), and then use https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentication-methods.html#apache-based-sso-with-remote-user https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentica... with an Apache .htaccess file as the thing that sets REMOTE_USER. Send a message in "#production help" in chat.zulip.org if you have trouble figuring it out, and I'll extend the docs until you can get it working.
  - hiisukun 8y ago
    Well, that's a great reply. Having read quickly through the docs, I think in particular the "Life of an Apache-based SSO login attempt" had enough information to clarify the process for me - until then I wasn't as sure. I don't think I would have located this option while filtering for "works without email, and I'm okay missing messages". If it was present a year ago I definitely didn't. Very glad it's a supported corner case!
    - tabbott 8y ago
      Yeah, the front-page documentation focuses pretty heavily on "you should setup email" because it helps folks in a normal environment successfully setup Zulip quickly and reliably. I'm not sure whether this use case is common enough that we should put it in the front-page docs, but possibly we should write something that Google will find...
Nux 8y ago
We looked at it, wanted to like it, but for self-hosted there were problems with app notifications, something that plagues most self-hosted hipchat replacements (except for xmpp).
- tabbott 8y ago
  When did you look? https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-push-notifications.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus... has been available for over a year, so self-hosted has the same notifications experience as Zulip Cloud.
  - Nux 8y ago
    It relies on Zulip's central notification service, so not entirely self-hosted.
    - zingmars 8y ago
      At the bottom of that link[1] you can find instructions on how to send notifications directly from your server, but it involves recompiling the apps (which is hardly Zulip's fault). [1] https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-push-notifications.html#sending-push-notifications-directly-from-your-server https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus...
      - Nux 8y ago
        Yes, this was covered under our evaluation, I appreciate it's not your fault. For what it's worth Zulip was at the top of our list when we evaluated hipchat replacements. Happy to look at it again if you ever will have direct notifications.
        ahofmann 8y ago
        What zingmars wanted to say is that it's not possible to have "self hosted" notifications without recompiling the Android and ios Apps.
akshayn 8y ago
As I commented here [1], one of my biggest issues with Zulip is that the mobile apps don't have a "jump to most recent" feature, and whenever I open the app I have to manually scroll past hours (or days or weeks, since I dislike opening the app so much) of old conversations. Has this been fixed/improved? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623592
- borisyankov 8y ago
  The mobile app does a "jump to the first unread message" by default, which is the same behavior the web app follows. If you don't want to read through all the messages in the current stream you can press "Mark as read" and then the app will be jumping you to the latest messages. Would that improve your navigation flow in the app?
Aeolun 8y ago
Am I the only one that just can’t stand the way zulip looks? I really don’t understand it myself, since it looks more or less the same as other apps, but my instinctual reaction is still ‘yuck!’.
- seedie 8y ago
  The first time I saw it I had the exact same reaction. Using it I encountered two things: - The UI looks better the more streams you are subscribed to - The UI just "works" I'm still not sure if the UI works because it is not distracting me with good looks ;)
nh2 8y ago
For me the most severe lacking feature of Zulip vs Slack is that you cannot mark messages as unread.

329 points by rishig 8y ago

I've said it before (so at the risk of annoying people ;-) I can highly recommend Zulip. We briefly used Mattermost (couple of months) before realising the Zulip threading model was a way better fit for us then what Mattermost offered. It might feel a bit odd in the beginning but after you've become accustomed with it you'll love it!

msie 8y ago

The one good thing about not having an on-prem Slack is communications after your company network goes down.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jfrankamp 8y ago
And the same in reverse is true, our comm channel has gone out several times due to slack being out of our control and going down. IMO this is a wash.
borski 8y ago
The one good thing about having an on-prem Slack is communications after the Slack network goes down.
- qiushihe 8y ago
  That's why you should run both.
  - bachmeier 8y ago
    Or print out all your conversations.

tedmiston 8y ago

It's pretty cool that he included the output of git shortlog -ns in the release announcement.

amdelamar 8y ago
I liked that too. But I prefer to hide merge commits using: git shortlog -sn --no-merges
- tabbott 8y ago
  Zulip has a rebase-based development workflow and doesn't use merge commits because in my experience, it produces a much more readable commit history (which is really important for understanding historical changes). We've been very happy with this approach. Some relevant reading on our version control approach for those who might be interested: * https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/git/overview.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/git/overview.html * https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/version-control.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/version-...
  - jtchang 8y ago
    Doesn't using rebase generally mean you have to rebase on top of master and thus with your local branch you may need to git push --force ?
    - tabbott 8y ago
      Yes. The default GitHub-recommended workflow of having contributors do `git pull` to integrate their changes an easily result in a confusing spaghetti monster history even if the contributor only has 1-2 commits that don't merge conflict with anything. For this reason, most major open source projects use that part of the workflow (asking their contributors to rebase their PRs on top of master and never use `git pull --merge`), even if they plan to merge the commits into master via a merge commit. (The Git documentation is very aggressive in discouraging force-pushing of commits, but that advice is intended for a public repository, like the main zulip.git repository, that others might pull from. Obviously, we don't force-push to zulip.git, but if you're using Git right, you should be force-pushing to your fork when you fix a typo in one of your commits.)

mahesh_rm 8y ago

Anybody knows why this over rocketchat?

demonshreder 8y ago
Zulip has a thread based Instant messaging model which helps facilitate multiple different conversations in the same channel without losing track / context. More on their homepage - https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/
- jfrankamp 8y ago
  What is the advantage of threads over just more specific top level channels. e.g. in their example why not #annual-summit-name-tags etc. One immediate thing slack does wrong is it makes channels too hard to make and destroy and leave and join, but if that was fixed... What is the advantage of the nesting?
  - aidenn0 8y ago
    zulip ends up being a bit like e-mail where you can add people to threads and they immediately have the history. I've used mattermost, not slack, but that basic model fixes a lot of issues I have with mattermost.
    - jfrankamp 8y ago
      A more specific slack channel (and I assume mattermost channel) is a thread that you can add people to any time and they will immediately have history. Or put in the inverse, a Zulip thread that is too general is a channel with information overload and becomes useless. Does the nesting have intrinsic value over simply more top level channels?
      - aidenn0 8y ago
        Mattermost has threads inside channels as well, but they end up underused since posts need not be to any specific thread. The idea is you subscribe to a channel, but then any post to the channel needs to also have some sort of logical subject.

thenaturalist 8y ago

Title is somehow linking to the blog instead of the actual product page (https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com).

Mononokay 8y ago
Because it's an announcement of a new version. Not that hard to figure out.

zafiro17 8y ago

I'd looked into Zulip a few months ago when it appeared on HN and it looks great to me. But this announcement mentions a new beta terminal client! That seals the deal for me! Love the idea of Zulip on a terminal: too good to be true for my organization at least.

raphlinus 8y ago

We've been using Zulip for just over a week in xi-editor and related projects, and I'm thrilled. Huge improvement over the pastiche of IRC and Reddit we were using before.

tabbott 8y ago
Zulip founder here; I should add that Zulip hosting is free for open source projects: https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/ https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/. A bunch of other cool open source projects use it, including Python Core, parts of the Rust community, MariaDB, Coala, the Lean Theorem Prover, the HL7 standard, and many more.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  How do you get the standard plan for an open source project? I don't see anything on that page or anywhere else, should we email the team for the bump?
  - raphlinus 8y ago
    "Just contact sales@zulipchat.com and we’d be happy to discuss your situation!" (https://zulipchat.com/plans/ https://zulipchat.com/plans/) That's what I did. Thanks again to them, I really appreciate it.
chubot 8y ago
I'm also using Zulip for Oil [1] and like it a lot :) Reddit was OK for awhile... I dislike the redesign because there are bugs with code formatting, and because the latency is worse. And it seems like they couldn't really make up their mind visually. Actually Zulip is one of the lowest latency web apps I've used in recent memory! I also have problems following IRC because of the lack of threading. [1] https://www.oilshell.org https://www.oilshell.org
michaelchris 8y ago
Do you have any links you could share? Or are you using zulip for internal comms only?

detaro 8y ago

last large discussion of Zulip (6 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675

Polyisoprene 8y ago

We looked at it briefly, but the number of components make it look more of a tech demo than a product meant to be installed on-prem. Redis, Postgres, Rabbitmq and Memcached just to run a chat?

hobbescotch 8y ago
This would certainly make it easier https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/master/docker-compose.yml https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip/blob/master/docker-com...
- Polyisoprene 8y ago
  Well, it’s not fewer components regardless how you package it. Running docker compose wasn’t enough to get into a fully configured system to be able to evaluate it even.
  - seedie 8y ago
    Do you remember the problems you ran into? I'm evaluating zulip with the help of the docker container (1.9.0-rc2) at the moment and docker-compose was enough to get it running.
    - Polyisoprene 8y ago
      Unfortunately not. It was a while ago, so I might have been unlucky with the version I tried. I believe after half a day of struggling to get it working, I got to the point where I was required to setup an organization or something like that and quit at that point and spent some time trying to remove everything.
TheDong 8y ago
> more of a tech demo than a product It is neither a tech demo nor a product, it is a mature open source project. In fact, in my mind tech demos tend towards having fewer mature components. > Redis, Postgres, Rabbitmq and Memcached just to run a chat That set of dependencies seems quite normal to me for a mature project. Mastodon (the most popular open-source-twitterish-thing) has a similar set of dependencies, and is also effectively just chat as you say. Discourse, a popular open source forum, is also basically just chat, and has a similar set of dependencies. In the case of zulip, you can even use a hosted version and avoid running anything yourself. I don't understand why its totally normal set of dependencies turns you off so harshly. I'll happily take a project using redis/postgresql/etc instead of trying to build its own versions of those baked into the binary because components like postgres/redis/etc have great documentation, tooling for metrics and monitoring, etc... If the project bakes its own stuff in itself to avoid taking on dependencies, I doubt it will either be as good or as easy to manage.

devy 8y ago

New to Zulip. So is it sponsored by Dropbox now after acquisition of Zulip Inc.? On the bottom of the page, it reads: Tim Abbott is the lead developer of the Zulip open source project. He previously was CTO of Ksplice and then Zulip Inc. (before it was acquired by Dropbox).

guessmyname 8y ago
The acquisition happened 5+ years ago. Here’s an Techcrunch article from Mar 17, 2014 [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-stealthy-workplace-chat-solution-still-in-private-beta/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-s...
nicholasjbs 8y ago
As far as I know Dropbox has no connection to Zulip now. Zulip was initially started as a company, which was acquired by Dropbox several years ago. Dropbox open sourced the code, and Tim (one of the Zulip cofounders) later left Dropbox to focus on running Zulip as an open source project.
tabbott 8y ago
Yikes, we haven't updated my blog bio in a while. Fixed to remove the confusing reference to Dropbox (which no longer has any formal involvement in Zulip); http://zulipchat.com/history http://zulipchat.com/history has further context for anyone curious.

Jumziey 8y ago

Whaaat!? I who always thought irc was the on-prem Slack alternative. Its a pretty cool thing that recently got created (around 1988). Try it out! Will blow you mind straight out of the water tbh. There's even some public chat rooms you can hang around in.

wild_preference 8y ago
IRC: No code-block formatting. Can't even receive messages when you're offline, out of the box. No message delete/edit. No built-in file hosting, must upload elsewhere and link it. No drag-and-drop. No real ergonomics in general. Way behind on community-building/-management features. Only particularly liked by the sort of person who considers tweaking their .conkyrc as a Friday well-spent. I hang out on freenode every day. But I have higher expectations of chat in 2018 when it comes to what I would choose for an actual organization. So does everyone else. IRC isn't blowing anyone's mind. Especially that first time they try to reply to someone but their message is never received because the other person closed their laptop.

Hydraulix989 8y ago

I also recommend RocketChat https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/

tibu 8y ago
Rocketchat or Zulip? Did somebody try maybe both?
- omnimus 8y ago
  I did. Also mattermost and matrix. Few years ago. Ended up with matrix instance. But it really depends on specific scale and usecase. From what i remember - Rocketchat was based on meteor, which seemed dying at the time + it was computing hungry and clients were especially hungry. - Mattermost worked for a time but you were not able to get mobile notifications without paying for license (not sure about now). Sounds suprising but it was just problem. - Zullip too many dependencies and complicated install. Matrix is more of a standard than anything. The first server implementation is called Matrix Synapse written in python twisted. I had it running without issues on 512mb vps for 30 people org with SQLITE. When you need bigger scale Matrix has some go and rust server implementations, you can also use postgres etc. I guess you should start with what scale you need and what features you need and go from there.
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    So the matrix guys created a new product/company called https://www.modular.im https://www.modular.im It's basically hosted Slack-using-riotchat/matrix. Very cheap too. Most of the other open source providers (incl Zulip and Mattermost) almost cost the same as slack.
  - vesak 8y ago
    > When you need bigger scale Matrix has some go and rust server implementations, you can also use postgres etc. Only Synapse is usable though. Dendrite (Go+Kafka) is getting there, but Ruma (Rust) seems to have been stalled waiting for the programming language to stabilize.

kossmoboleat 8y ago

How well does the Hangouts integration work? I found it involved too many steps when using Hangouts in Slack

tabbott 8y ago
It's pretty simple: There's a button you can click at the bottom of the compose box that generates a new Hangouts video chat link; once oyu send your message, users can click the link to join.
mikewhy 8y ago
> too many steps when using Hangouts in Slack What are the steps involved? For us, it's "tap the phone icon in the top right".

jimmy1 8y ago

I mistakenly assumed there wasn't a paid offering. So it's becoming clear that the only revenue model going forward is open core model.

rishig 8y ago
Zulip supports itself by selling hosting (at zulipchat.com) and support contracts for on-prem installations. Everything is a part of the open source project; no proprietary add-ons.
exabrial 8y ago
They have that?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
wmf 8y ago
It looks like the paid edition of Zulip is the same as the open source version so it's not open core. Of course if Zulip becomes too popular then we may see AWS GroupChat followed by a license change...
- bradknowles 8y ago
  AWS already has Chime. They don’t need anything else.

nicholasjbs 8y ago

We (the Recurse Center) have been using Zulip since early 2013, and it is the core of our online community. Zulip is excellent both for small teams (we use it for our team of 7) and big groups - we also run a realm with over 1,000 users posting 10s of thousands of messages monthly. I can't recommend it highly enough.

erinnh 8y ago
How do you handle high availability for Zulip? Last I looked that was a problem for it.
- nicholasjbs 8y ago
  We don't run our own instance; we're hosted by zulipchat.com. Perfect uptime isn't a priority for us, so I don't know what (if any) availability they promise. But we've had almost no downtime over the past five years, and we've certainly had less than the public Slack outages I've seen folks talking about on Twitter :)
- tabbott 8y ago
  Zulip founder here. It's definitely possible to run a Zulip server with essentially no downtime. E.g. the main zulipchat.com service has had approximately 10 user-facing outages with a median duration of 5-10 minutes over the last 5 years (there was one while we still only had a few hundred users that lasted overnight), most of them in the middle of the night. Happy to talk more about this for anyone curious; there are some fun stories (like migrating from MySQL to Postgres as our primary database technology with <30 minutes of downtime early in its development). We don't have a public uptime SLA for zulipchat.com uptime yet, but we're happy to make them for individual customers (and I suppose we should add one). If you're self-hosting, our commercial support offerings will help you setup your servers in a way that achieves your uptime goals; because Zulip is so stable, usually folks just go with a hot spare (our enterprise customers generally only report downtime related to server upgrades, which is usually avoidable).

woolvalley 8y ago

How does it compare to mattermost?

sien 8y ago
Exactly. We're looking at paying for Slack and mattermost seems to offer most of what Slack does and is something that would be pretty easy to run. It's slick. Well documented and installs nicely in a container. Has anyone here used Mattermost? https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/
- meritt 8y ago
  We've been using Mattermost (I have not used Zulip but it looks superb) for about a year. The UI/UX of the desktop and mobile apps is a bit kludgy but functionally it was a breeze to setup, runs on a very low-cost instance, and has had 100% uptime. And most importantly, we're in control of our data unlike cloud-only offerings.
- tiles 8y ago
  Have you tried out Zulip? You may find the user experience pretty compelling. It's an entire alternative interface to the slack or IRC-style of chatrooms, and it's OSS and documents how to make it containerized.
  - sien 8y ago
    Not yet. Both mattermost and zulip look well worth it for saving quite a bit of money over slack for a fair sized company though. The responses from people here are really interesting.
- seedie 8y ago
  Not sure if this helps, but we were evaluating Mattermost and are still evaluating Zulip at the moment. Our users pretty fast had a tendency towards Zulip, while I've had a slight preference for Mattermost from a ops view. We only have/had a short eval phase and our use case is a small raceengineering team with 40 people at the racetrack, independent of internet access. So a very particualar use case, and our needs might not cover you needs. Zulip pro * Threading model (can't value that high enough) * All messages overview, no matter what stream they were written in * Zulip community at chat.zulip.org with direct contact to the devs. Tim Abbott the lead dev helped me out in a issue with a user login (haven't used the Mattermost support so can't compare) Zulip con * Most ops work has to be done by a python script manage.py, API has room to improve Mattermost pro * API * haven't measured but the UI felt smoother, faster Mattermost con * you have to pay for Enterprise features Both have great docs and a docker deployment

grizzles 8y ago

Judging from the zulip.org server it looks like there is a need for a chronological topic decay feature.

tabbott 8y ago
Zulip founder here; I'm curious why you think that? Here's our thinking. Topics within a stream are ordered by the time of the most recent message. We keep the complete history, both of messages and topics, because it's useful for search and following up on things. Personally, I regularly reply to a conversation whose last message was a month or more ago to follow up with new information (often after getting there from one of the permanent links in our issue tracker). Because the context is all there and available with just a single click on the topic, I find it to be a really nice workflow.
- grizzles 8y ago
  The list of topics is too long to scroll through. For example, under general on zulip.org. A better UI would be if it just showed a few that it thought you might be interested in, and had autocomplete-type search for others.
  - tabbott 8y ago
    I agree that the "more topics" thing takes up too much vertical space after just one click to see deeper history. We actually just had a discussion of it last week; the issue created from that is here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/10786 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/10786
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Hi there! I just started using Zulip (first-time user) looking forward to migrate off Slack and unfortunately I've been really disappointed. In Slack I can just load the website and begin typing into whatever channel I'm at (or use 1 click to select the right one if it's not the current one). In Zulip, it seems there's been a deliberately goal of explicitly designing it to be excruciating painful. For some reason Enter doesn't work by default (in which chat system is Enter an unfamiliar command for sending?!), and then I always have to press 'R' or click something to reply to (which often takes multiple clicks and several seconds)... why make things deliberately complicated/painful without even an option to turn off this 'feature'?

mxuribe 8y ago

I'm a matrix - really via riot client - user, but never used zulip...Can anyone cite 1 or 2 big benefits of using zulip over matrix clients? I'm genuinely curious.

mockingbirdy 8y ago
https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ For me it's Zulip Topics - they make it very easy to organize the communication. You have channels and they contain topics. This is one of the most useful features of Zulip. Most features of all chat clients (riot, slack, mattermost, rocket.chat, zulip) are pretty similar.

shin_lao 8y ago

We are heavy Slack users. We tried Zulip. No one in the team liked the ergonomics of Zulip and how difficult it was to integrate. Just for threaded discussions we felt the switch was not worth it. It didn't stick and we stayed in Slack.

Aeolun 8y ago
Might want to look at https://twist.com/home https://twist.com/home It seems a bit like a slakey zulip to me, though I haven’t had opportunity to use it yet.
- zingmars 8y ago
  No self hosted option :(

amelius 8y ago

As someone who follows technology closely, I find it a bit frustrating that chat is making such little progress, and that for our communication we've essentially moved from federated email to silo-based chat solutions (which is hardly a feature), and lock-in that comes with these. How is "IT" going to save the world if we get stuck like this as a profession? I suspect one problem is that at universities there is no credit to be earned from coming up with a chat protocol that can serve us the coming decades, and hence we're stuck with solutions from corporations and their inherent problems ... But of course that's not to say that there is anything wrong with the quality of the product being promoted here.

brylie 8y ago
For what it's worth, Zulip is one of a few projects to support federated chat. From the linked document: "Zulip now has an IRC bridge powered by matrix.org"
- amelius 8y ago
  Yes, they probably support email as well, that's not the point. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... (not saying this is the case here, just that it shouldn't be a concern)

rob-olmos 8y ago

If anyone has tried G Suite Chat, it looks like they've added "threads" at some recent point but the UX has some ways to go.

abraae 8y ago

I love Zulip and wish it the best. But this comment on the zuplipchat web site https://zulipchat.com/security/ https://zulipchat.com/security/ feels like a pretty gross generalisation and detracts from Zulip's vibe IMO: > With many SaaS providers, essentially all engineers have direct shell access to production servers storing user data. Zulip Cloud is different: only a small handful of security-trained engineers have access to production servers or to sensitive customer data.

tabbott 8y ago
Yikes, I'm not sure how "essentially all" ever got in there; it should have been "the majority of". And even with that edit, our practice is, where possible, to cite sources, and while there's a lot of anecdotal data on this topic, there aren't great published sources for this topic. So whether or not it's shockingly common for companies to have dozens or hundreds of people with shell access to production, we've removed the commentary on what other organizations do here, and just explain our practices. I really appreciate the feedback!

hiisukun 8y ago

I'd love to set this up at my part time workplace, but it's a forensics shop where the network is offline, and doesn't have email. Team is small (<20) so manual accounts would be fine. Am I reading the docs correctly in that email is absolutely required? I haven't checked thoroughly for this new release, but previously it was for missed message notification as well as account creation, if I'm remembering right. It's not a for profit place, so I'm simply looking to self host, sans email, to make communication easier across the teams. Current solution is definitely inferior to Zulip!

tabbott 8y ago
We support this, it's just enough of a corner case that it's not well documented. If you don't care about missed-message emails, you can install the Docker image (easiest to setup when offline), and then use https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentication-methods.html#apache-based-sso-with-remote-user https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentica... with an Apache .htaccess file as the thing that sets REMOTE_USER. Send a message in "#production help" in chat.zulip.org if you have trouble figuring it out, and I'll extend the docs until you can get it working.
- hiisukun 8y ago
  Well, that's a great reply. Having read quickly through the docs, I think in particular the "Life of an Apache-based SSO login attempt" had enough information to clarify the process for me - until then I wasn't as sure. I don't think I would have located this option while filtering for "works without email, and I'm okay missing messages". If it was present a year ago I definitely didn't. Very glad it's a supported corner case!
  - tabbott 8y ago
    Yeah, the front-page documentation focuses pretty heavily on "you should setup email" because it helps folks in a normal environment successfully setup Zulip quickly and reliably. I'm not sure whether this use case is common enough that we should put it in the front-page docs, but possibly we should write something that Google will find...

Nux 8y ago

We looked at it, wanted to like it, but for self-hosted there were problems with app notifications, something that plagues most self-hosted hipchat replacements (except for xmpp).

tabbott 8y ago
When did you look? https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-push-notifications.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus... has been available for over a year, so self-hosted has the same notifications experience as Zulip Cloud.
- Nux 8y ago
  It relies on Zulip's central notification service, so not entirely self-hosted.
  - zingmars 8y ago
    At the bottom of that link[1] you can find instructions on how to send notifications directly from your server, but it involves recompiling the apps (which is hardly Zulip's fault). [1] https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-push-notifications.html#sending-push-notifications-directly-from-your-server https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus...
    - Nux 8y ago
      Yes, this was covered under our evaluation, I appreciate it's not your fault. For what it's worth Zulip was at the top of our list when we evaluated hipchat replacements. Happy to look at it again if you ever will have direct notifications.
      - ahofmann 8y ago
        What zingmars wanted to say is that it's not possible to have "self hosted" notifications without recompiling the Android and ios Apps.

akshayn 8y ago

As I commented here [1], one of my biggest issues with Zulip is that the mobile apps don't have a "jump to most recent" feature, and whenever I open the app I have to manually scroll past hours (or days or weeks, since I dislike opening the app so much) of old conversations. Has this been fixed/improved? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17623592

borisyankov 8y ago
The mobile app does a "jump to the first unread message" by default, which is the same behavior the web app follows. If you don't want to read through all the messages in the current stream you can press "Mark as read" and then the app will be jumping you to the latest messages. Would that improve your navigation flow in the app?

Aeolun 8y ago

Am I the only one that just can’t stand the way zulip looks? I really don’t understand it myself, since it looks more or less the same as other apps, but my instinctual reaction is still ‘yuck!’.

seedie 8y ago
The first time I saw it I had the exact same reaction. Using it I encountered two things: - The UI looks better the more streams you are subscribed to - The UI just "works" I'm still not sure if the UI works because it is not distracting me with good looks ;)

nh2 8y ago

For me the most severe lacking feature of Zulip vs Slack is that you cannot mark messages as unread.