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Apart from the threading model, I love Zulip for its openness. It's quite sad Slack and Discord are often the first choice for open communities. They are siloed

Apart from the threading model, I love Zulip for its openness. It's quite sad Slack and Discord are often the first choice for open communities. They are siloed and unless you are deliberately searching in a specific workspace, you'll never run into the information in a search engine. In comparison, Zulip: - provides HTML export functionality https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive#zulip-html-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive#zulip-html-archive (example https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive ) - URLs are nice and encode meaning (e.g. https://memex.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/279601-hpi/topic/work.20on.20grafana.2Finfluxdb.20integration https://memex.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/279601-hpi/topic/...) ... compare with Slack/Discord meaningless character sequences - I'm excited about https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/4817 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/4817 , which would allow viewing workspaces in 'guest' mode, without registering at all

Operyl 5y ago
To be fair, the Discord URIs are passed around in chat, etc. They're not that opaque, for a guild message it's just serverid/channelid/messageid. The numbers are snowflakes.
slimsag 5y ago
I think once Zulip gets a "guest mode", it will be a huge boon in its adoption for OSS communities. I love Zulip!
- tabbott 5y ago
  > I think once Zulip gets a "guest mode", it will be a huge boon in its adoption for OSS communities Agreed! To clarify the terminology, "guests" in Zulip (and other team chat products, e.g. Slack) generally refers to users with an account but with limited access. https://zulip.com/help/roles-and-permissions https://zulip.com/help/roles-and-permissions has more detail on that. We've been tentatively planning to use the term "web-public streams" for streams that an open community has configured to be accessible without creating a Zulip account. The project is quite far along; the latest PR is here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16728 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16728 (The PR looks stale, but that's only because we paused integrating it to focus on finishing 4.0; I would be sad if we don't have it at least in beta this summer.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stavros 5y ago
Zulip is amazing. I'm of the opinion that Slack is actively bad for work, because it encourages ephemeral, disjointed chats that you can't easily find again later. Zulip is fast, light, and is a much more natural way to chat. The "river" of messages that you can zoom in and out of is just fantastic.
- sgt 5y ago
  Start treating it as async as possible, and the situation will improve. If team members get the impression you will always respond immediately, it will lead to a lot of wasted time and lack of concentration.
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    The thing is Slack's UX is geared against that. We can treat it as async, but the moment someone sends a second message about the same topic to the room, you're done, the conversation starts diverging. It's also dog-slow, I have to wait for it all the time. Editing a message is an exercise in futility.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      I recently had to take screenshots of some 2 Year old messages in Telegram, WhatsApp and MS Teams. In Telegram it took 3 minutes to scroll through thousands of messages and load all that data, in What's app it took 25 minutes, and in Teams I never succeeded This is on an 8-core machine with a gigabit connection in 2021.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        On my 2017 Xeon workstation and in Telegram, I can just press the Find shortcut, type a keyword and get results from back in 2015 in a manner of 1-2 seconds. It's amazing.
        ClumsyPilot 5y ago
fnord123 5y ago
>It's quite sad Slack and Discord are often the first choice for open communities. Slack is particularly bad as you need to make a new account for each instance (i.e. project). And you need to log in to each instance separately on each device where you have Slack.
- tchock23 5y ago
  This is why I struggle to understand how Slack has been adopted so broadly for building online communities. The need to have separate accounts per instance is such a hassle. I spent twenty minutes yesterday trying to find which account I used to sign in to a dev-related Slack on a new laptop that had yet to login.
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    Conversely, I’m on several slacks, and I’ve only ever used the same account on all of them. One slack app and one slack account works for all of them. I do hate the way that Discord forces me to use the same account and same profile on all the discord servers I connect to through the client. I could connect to different ones with different accounts on different web browsers, but that’s a royal pain. I guess I care more about the different communities I connect to through Discord, and I want to have more unique profiles for each of them, whereas just the one profile works for all the slacks that I am connected to.
    - fnord123 5y ago
      > Conversely, I’m on several slacks, and I’ve only ever used the same account on all of them. One slack app and one slack account works for all of them. How? Each time I join a slack, e.g. haproxy, i need to make a new slack account tied to my email address for that slack instance. How do you make a single slack account to be used everywhere?
kungito 5y ago
I don't like Slack but Discord is a great piece of engineering. They hit all the right spots for many types of communities. Personally for searching I actually with people used chat groups less and opened stackoverflow questions more. I hate having to search through unstructured chat to find if someone asked my question previously or if no one answers your question right away it gets buried under new questions. What zulip needs to compete against Discord is voice chats. I feel like many communities feel the need to exist on voice and chat channels at the same time and not having that forces people to have 2 disconnected services

Operyl 5y ago

To be fair, the Discord URIs are passed around in chat, etc. They're not that opaque, for a guild message it's just serverid/channelid/messageid. The numbers are snowflakes.

slimsag 5y ago

I think once Zulip gets a "guest mode", it will be a huge boon in its adoption for OSS communities. I love Zulip!

tabbott 5y ago
> I think once Zulip gets a "guest mode", it will be a huge boon in its adoption for OSS communities Agreed! To clarify the terminology, "guests" in Zulip (and other team chat products, e.g. Slack) generally refers to users with an account but with limited access. https://zulip.com/help/roles-and-permissions https://zulip.com/help/roles-and-permissions has more detail on that. We've been tentatively planning to use the term "web-public streams" for streams that an open community has configured to be accessible without creating a Zulip account. The project is quite far along; the latest PR is here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16728 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16728 (The PR looks stale, but that's only because we paused integrating it to focus on finishing 4.0; I would be sad if we don't have it at least in beta this summer.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stavros 5y ago

Zulip is amazing. I'm of the opinion that Slack is actively bad for work, because it encourages ephemeral, disjointed chats that you can't easily find again later. Zulip is fast, light, and is a much more natural way to chat. The "river" of messages that you can zoom in and out of is just fantastic.

sgt 5y ago
Start treating it as async as possible, and the situation will improve. If team members get the impression you will always respond immediately, it will lead to a lot of wasted time and lack of concentration.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  The thing is Slack's UX is geared against that. We can treat it as async, but the moment someone sends a second message about the same topic to the room, you're done, the conversation starts diverging. It's also dog-slow, I have to wait for it all the time. Editing a message is an exercise in futility.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    I recently had to take screenshots of some 2 Year old messages in Telegram, WhatsApp and MS Teams. In Telegram it took 3 minutes to scroll through thousands of messages and load all that data, in What's app it took 25 minutes, and in Teams I never succeeded This is on an 8-core machine with a gigabit connection in 2021.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      On my 2017 Xeon workstation and in Telegram, I can just press the Find shortcut, type a keyword and get results from back in 2015 in a manner of 1-2 seconds. It's amazing.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago

fnord123 5y ago

>It's quite sad Slack and Discord are often the first choice for open communities. Slack is particularly bad as you need to make a new account for each instance (i.e. project). And you need to log in to each instance separately on each device where you have Slack.

tchock23 5y ago
This is why I struggle to understand how Slack has been adopted so broadly for building online communities. The need to have separate accounts per instance is such a hassle. I spent twenty minutes yesterday trying to find which account I used to sign in to a dev-related Slack on a new laptop that had yet to login.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Conversely, I’m on several slacks, and I’ve only ever used the same account on all of them. One slack app and one slack account works for all of them. I do hate the way that Discord forces me to use the same account and same profile on all the discord servers I connect to through the client. I could connect to different ones with different accounts on different web browsers, but that’s a royal pain. I guess I care more about the different communities I connect to through Discord, and I want to have more unique profiles for each of them, whereas just the one profile works for all the slacks that I am connected to.
  - fnord123 5y ago
    > Conversely, I’m on several slacks, and I’ve only ever used the same account on all of them. One slack app and one slack account works for all of them. How? Each time I join a slack, e.g. haproxy, i need to make a new slack account tied to my email address for that slack instance. How do you make a single slack account to be used everywhere?

kungito 5y ago

I don't like Slack but Discord is a great piece of engineering. They hit all the right spots for many types of communities. Personally for searching I actually with people used chat groups less and opened stackoverflow questions more. I hate having to search through unstructured chat to find if someone asked my question previously or if no one answers your question right away it gets buried under new questions. What zulip needs to compete against Discord is voice chats. I feel like many communities feel the need to exist on voice and chat channels at the same time and not having that forces people to have 2 disconnected services