Backing up from the special case of a paternity leave, what's important here is that with Zulip, catching up on conversations you missed is an efficient use of

Backing up from the special case of a paternity leave, what's important here is that with Zulip, catching up on conversations you missed is an efficient use of your time, which it really isn't for other team chat tools. Essentially everyone has miniature versions of the catch-up problem: * Fulltime employees coming back from a normal 1-2 week vacation. * Anyone working closely with collaborators in other time zones (I wake up every morning to a couple hundred new messages in chat.zulip.org sent by our international community members). * Any leader who spends a lot of time in meetings and wants to focus on the meeting and then batch-process communications afterwards. * Any engineer who wants to be able to spend a whole or half day focusing on a really difficult problem and catch up on conversations afterwards. * Anyone who's a part-time participant in an open community, whether they just check it once a day, one a week, or once a month. A user in this situation really wants to skim everything that happened and find what's interesting to them, not read the last few hours' traffic, which is what the Slack/Discord/Teams model forces you to do. The same technique core works for all of these cases: pick your favorite streams and read them with `n` as I described above, then perhaps browse the list of topics in several more and click into just the topics that interest you and then mark the rest (if any) as read. All IRC-inspired chat tools are a really rough experience for part-time participants -- they just don't have a way to let you prioritize reading interesting conversations. We discuss this issue at length and its consequences for inclusivity of the communities that use them in https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ https://zulip.com/for/open-source/. (It's framed around inclusivity in open source, but the Slack channel model also can exclude leaders who spend most of their time in meetings) (As a sidenote, being able to do this is why Zulip pushes users to have every conversation in a topic, rather than "threading" being a side feature used for 10% messages like some other tools do.)