Made some small contributions to Zulip and I can confirm that their team (and leader) is super friendly, and it's actually relatively easy to self-host these da

Made some small contributions to Zulip and I can confirm that their team (and leader) is super friendly, and it's actually relatively easy to self-host these days. My personal favorite thing about Zulip is the keyboard navigation and how much muscle memory you can build moving around threads/conversations. Of course there's also the actual markdown (not some weird variant).