10 ms·

Why Zulip will stand the test of time

166 points by williamstein 5y ago

MiyamotoAkira 5y ago
Love Zulip. Structured conversations are possible, which is what i want for a business setting. Topics are a great implementation. Code syntax highlighting and code playgrounds are nifty
- usr1106 5y ago
  Exactltly, they are technically possible. However, you always have the non-technical people who create complete nonsense topics instead of using a matching existing one. And also some disorganized engineers who continue off-topic discussions for dozens of messages. Switching to a suitable topic when the discussion gets carried away could probably get more user-friendly support. You can edit the topic of existing messages, but there is no completion for existing topics and there is no clear indication of what got moved from where by whom and no simple undo if things go wrong.
aidenn0 5y ago
Zulip is the only thing I've seen recently that does better group conversations around particular topics better than NNTP and e-mail did 30 years ago. I've only used it for a few things since there are network effects around any communications technology but unlike slack or discord, I'm actually pleased when it's the communication medium of choice for a project.
- postpawl 5y ago
  Slack’s threads suck compared to Zulip’s. In Slack, threads only notify thread participants unless you choose to send it to the channel too, which defeats the purpose of threads by interrupting other conversations. In Zulip, everything in the channel/stream must be a thread, kinda like email.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Zulip does most things better than Slack. I can't stand Slack, it's slow, bloated, and the UX is bad. Zulip's UX is a breath of fresh air. It's just so quick to catch up on old messages, mute irrelevant threads, see everything in chronological order, zoom in or out... I just love it.
    - spurgu 5y ago
      I've been using Zulip daily for over a month now and I love it! As do my colleagues who are now very happy users. Looking forward to whenever Zulip implements /digress. That's something I realized was missing right from the start - how to "branch out" from a topic into a new one, creating some sort of sign/breadcrumb indicating that the message got a reply in a new topic. Currently you can quote reply and change the topic for the new message, but there's no indication in the original topic that there was a digression, so discovery is a bit clunky. Original issue: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/14522 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/14522 Some work done and demos: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16589 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16589 Discussion: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/.2Fdigress https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/.2Fdi...
  - cracell 5y ago
    I have no idea how Slack threads are intended to be used. Their own examples are very trivial and the implementation feels like like a first pass that they never did any usability testing with.
    - warmfuzzykitten 5y ago
      Slack threads seem designed to ensure you can't follow a conversation without branching off into numerous sidetracks, which are hard to find when you're directly addressed.
nousermane 5y ago
Zulip is implementing the same bad architecture as google/ms/apple/fb's messengers (custom protocol, no federation), but at least it does it well (open source, usable, do-one-thing-well, no dark patterns, powerful and stable API).
- duped 5y ago
  How is it "bad" if it's the standard used by the most successful messenger platforms
  - rcthompson 5y ago
    Because there isn't a standard. The point is each one implements their own protocol instead of adapting a standard such as Matrix or XMPP. (Whether any suitable standard exists (much less existed in 2012!) is another issue, but regardless it's fair to say that the current state of things is not ideal.)
    - duped 5y ago
      I don't think "whether any suitable standard exists" is another issue, it's the exact one. If you're building a product and there is no standard to cover core technology, you roll your own because it's faster than waiting for someone else to invent one. But that said I don't think "using a standard protocol" is a value in and of itself.
      - jlkuester7 5y ago
        > But that said I don't think "using a standard protocol" is a value in and of itself. Standard protocols are very valuable if you care about reach while avoiding vendor-lock-in. I want to be able to self-host my server (or pay someone to host it for me), but I also want to be able to communicate with people on other servers. It is that balance of control and networking that is really powerful. Someone else mentioned here about how FHIR uses Zulip as the group chat for their community. That is great! But, to participate, you need an account on their instance and then if you want to participate in multiple Zulip instances you either need multiple clients or some kind of multi-instance support in your client. And then you still have to manage separate profiles for each instance, etc, etc... OTOH, a bunch of open source projects use Matrix instances for their community chat rooms. One of the huge benefits I see from that is that I can use my single Matrix account (on the server that I host) to join all the different communities that I am interested in. (And now with the new Spaces feature in Element, there is even better controls over being able to still retain a separation of concerns between all the different conversations I am a part of...)
romwell 5y ago
Saving this post for after the test comes
akvadrako 5y ago
I've looked at Zulip for a local group and there a couple big problems that prevented me from considering it as a Slack replacement: 1. The UI is unattractive and over-crowded. Introducing non-techies to it would require saying at least "it looks bad at first, but you'll learn to like it." 2. It's complicated to deploy. Not just a simple docker container or anything.
- nousermane 5y ago
  > complicated to deploy. Not just a simple docker container or anything. Huh? https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip
  - azundo 5y ago
    > Project status: Alpha. While this project works and is used by many sites in production, configuring is substantially more error-prone than the normal Zulip installer (which Just Works). There is a docker container but as Zulip themselves say, it is not simple to deploy.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Yes, and when you update docker container 4.8-0 to 4.8-1, it crashes on startup complaining about missing columns. As the sibling commenter said, it is alpha.
- mushufasa 5y ago
  2. also literally one click here https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/zulip https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/zulip
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Initial launch is easy, but try to update from one release to another. You will have to, when the security releases will be out. Solving issues like why it doesn't connect to it's own redis instance anymore, when only its own script touch the config. Not very funny times.
JaggerJo 5y ago
The client is a piece of shit tho. Posted to the wrong channel/topic more than once now.. A native mac app would be a game changer. Would pay for it.
jlkuester7 5y ago
Hooray for Zulip! It is a ready great example of the amazing things that can be accomplished by an open source community (and founder's like Tim Abbott who understand how to prioritize that community and its users). Thank you for your work!
bawolff 5y ago
Meh. Open source isn't magic. It can still fail just like anything else.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I see people downvoting this, but while it may not be artfully phrased it's absolutely true. There are countless small projects which fell by the wayside because they didn't get enough users to build a true community (e.g., "Ted," a "Rich Text Processor" that was, about 20 years ago, my favorite WYSIWYG-ish open source word processor) -- and even some relatively big name ones that were created by one company that just didn't get traction when the company stopped supporting them. Google Wave was already mentioned in the comments on this artlce and it counts; another one was the company I was at in the mid-2010s: RethinkDB. AFAIK, there's only been one minor release since the company folded and I think that release was the one that was "in progress" when the doors shut. Zulip seems like it's in a much better place to survive, taking the word of the article, with an active development community around it. (I don't think I've actually heard of Zulip after the original company was bought by Dropbox, although "whether chipotle_coyote has heard of this" is admittedly not a leading indicator of success.)
- mlinksva 5y ago
  The "why" in the article doesn't rest on open source being magic: - building company without VC - 100% open source, easy to self-host, high quality import/export - building software so that it is easy to maintain and operate - substantial community of developers (100+ commits) beyond those employed by company Open source as magic seems like at most 25% of the argument, more charitably 10%.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I think a good point of comparison would be phabricator. It meets much of the same criteria (although much is subjective of course). Look where phabricator is now.
    - mlinksva 5y ago
zwkrt 5y ago
And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- svieira 5y ago
  Though under the earth and throneless now I be Yet, while I lived, all the earth was under me.
- easton_s 5y ago
  If you cross any bridges watchout for Liam Neeson.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- circularfoyers 5y ago
  I heard Richard Attenborough's voice in my head as I read this[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX0oubhFydc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX0oubhFydc
  - vinaypai 5y ago
    I heard it in Leonard Nemoy's voice, discovering the Contstruction technology in Civilization 4.
terpimost 5y ago
At start I was a bit afraid of Zulip but after a while I get used to it. It works pretty good and fast. I hope someday it would be possible to easily extract topics or messages into some knowledge base
- strifel 5y ago
  probably pretty easy using the API. https://zulip.com/api/ https://zulip.com/api/
joshuakelly 5y ago
Zulip is used for the FHIR community (chat.fhir.org) and it manages to deliver a much more "email thread"/async communication stream. It's almost closer to a Hacker News than one of the dozens/hundreds of forgettable Slack/Discords for other communities.
bachmeier 5y ago
Maybe a better title would be "Why your Zulip data will stand the test of time". I think that's really the point he's making: the company will be fine, but even if something bad does happen, you won't be left hanging. With respect to Zulip the company, I think they have a great product, but they need to market themselves as being something differen from chat/Slack. Zulip is built from the ground up to support a very different workflow. I guess most people try Zulip because they're looking for a Slack competitor and they get the wrong product. If I were Richard Stallman, I would suggest ZINC (Zulip is not chat) as an alias, and everyone would adopt it because Slack is not a recursive acronym.[0] [0] YMMV
- cmroanirgo 5y ago
  Although this bug report [0] states the difficulties facing them, zulip doesn't do e2e, which is a deal breaker for many communities. So, a title as you suggest should be "Why your Zulip data will stand the test of time, provided no one steals it". Aren't we a long way down the road of understanding that all server systems should be regarded as an "untrust" environment? I feel this way about my own self hosted systems. If your critical data leaks, you're hosed. If corporate needs to have audit trails then there needs to be a system that deliberately breaks e2e, something that all clients posting on that system know about and display messages about, rather than the current implementation. About server side search... that's a different issue, but couldn't it be done with hashing keywords on the client and a disclaimer on how this may reduce security? So, all in all, I get why e2e is hard for zulip, but standing the test of time without it could be difficult. [0] https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    I don't think Slack offers e2e. If they do, it's a recent development.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I don't see any value for e2e on a team chat. With e2e you lose not only server-side search but also message archives for new users (and new clients for old users too, if you use something with forward secrecy). In exchange, it makes hacking the server prevent leakage. Meanwhile if even a single client gets hacked, all of your group-chats are still compromised. A big part of the value of something like Zulip versus e-mail is you can link to historical threads, and know that everyone can read them. E2E is purposefully hostile towards "everyone reading them" so it's a major tradeoff. Do you want E2E on your bugtracker? CI logs? Doing so for Zulip makes about as much sense IMO. Note that if GH used E2E for issues (which is arguably a form of group chat), the link you posted to the discussion would not be readable by me.
hadlock 5y ago
At my last company we had an open rebellion against using Zulip for at least two years, before the product team budgeted for slack enterprise and the engineering team switched to that for DMs, although formal communication still happened through zulip to appease our VP. The mac client was never fast, search was neigh impossible to use across 7 years of messages and there were frequent issues with client stability and drop outs. More than once I've seen someone "mark all messages as read" and cause the service to crash. "Is zulip down?" was a sort of running joke among the engineers. I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision.
- Zigurd 5y ago
  I used it for chat and automated notifications related to a git workflow, both the repos and chat were self-hosted. It was far less polished than Slack (and Slack was not that polished back then). But fine for that purpose. In less tech centric environments the rough edges are more bothersome.
- serial_dev 5y ago
  > I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision. This resonated with me, at my current company hundreds (maybe thousands, I don't know) of employees' daily chat goes through a self hosted RocketChat instance. For all I know, based on the performance, that server is running on the cheapest Raspberry Pi. Everyone on the team just kind of accepted that sometimes, you can't connect for minutes (sometimes hours), the search is slow and not very powerful, the features and integrations are lacking. It's so frustrating when you want to contact someone, you can't, because it won't load, if you want to add an integration (that you are used to from your last company and would make things much easier for everyone), you can't, because there are no good integrations for RocketChat. In my opinion, terrible internal chat and penny pinching is a good sign of a dysfunctional organization. Ten dollars per employee per month sounds expensive, until you realize that your employees wait an hour a week for the self hosted tool to load and are now blocked because of that.
  - 5y ago
wellthisisgreat 5y ago
Switched to Zulip from Slack and then Teams and LOVE it. We did a ton of research into what team messenger we could use and, frankly, I have no idea what could be a better alternative to Zulip. Discord forces to use one account everywhere, Slack sucks for search and threads and causes too much noise and clutter, Teams , well we are still recovering from the emotional and productivity damaged it caused. What else is there?
- bachmeier 5y ago
  Twist
  - jlkuester7 5y ago
    > Twist Hmm, I assume you are talking about https://twist.com/ https://twist.com/ This is the first time looking at that service and I find it equally intriguing and confusing. It seems like a cross between Slack and Notion (ideally capturing the best of both worlds). But I would love to hear from someone who has actually used it regarding its benefits vs other chat systems...
- ngrilly 5y ago
  How many employees? What is the company doing? Is it mainly tech? Asking because people in my group were a bit disappointed by Zulip UI.
  - wellthisisgreat 5y ago
    10, all tech plus designers. The UI is minimal but it also doesn’t get in the way and the topics really help keep things in check
    - ngrilly 5y ago
      In a context similar to yours, I'd definitely use Zulip.
  - spurgu 5y ago
wolverine876 5y ago
> "Will this product still exist and be responsibly maintained in a few years?" / This question is harder to answer than it might seem. A publicly-traded company may be unlikely to go out of business, but large companies (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Atlassian) routinely abandon products. A startup that has raised a flashy round of VC funding may soon (like Quill) be acquired with the intent to shut down its product, or go out of business altogether. The safest products on this front are likely large open-source projects with a broad community, like Python, Linux, or PostgreSQL. Enterprise software companies also generally provide long-term support and backward compatibility. Look at Microsoft and Windows. OS/2 by IBM, first released 1987, flopped in the marketplace. IBM supported it for ~20 years, then licensed others to support it. People often reject the added expense of enterprise software, but you get what you pay for.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  > Enterprise software companies also generally provide long-term support and backward compatibility Honest question for anyone familiar with enterprise SAAS contracts: does the same apply? I mean sure, I have seem MS/Oracle provide crazy-long support for some of their software offerings, but if MS decided one day to pivot away from Teams, is there any clauses in the 365 contracts that prevent them from just shutting down the servers?
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > is there any clauses in the 365 contracts that prevent them from just shutting down the servers? The clause is in their reputation: If they did that, they would lose a lot of corporate business for all their products. > SAAS However, could they raise prices substantially ...?
stagger87 5y ago
So he sold the original company/product, then got it released as open source, and built another company based on it? Nice...
asah 5y ago
Love Zulip! Simple architecture, amazing packaging release/upgrade process and very developer friendly at all levels! I actually pulled away from Facebook, invited everyone to a Zulip server, hacked on it to provide changes people wanted, and we're loving it. Login-with-Google was trivial to setup. Some users prefer to email the server and the gateway was so easy to setup. Search Just Worked(tm). It's fast. It's easy to admin. and and and... I have only one complaint... but it's a biggie: the UI/UX. I don't normally care, but literally every one of my users has commented that it's an ugly duckling - both the mobile app and website. We'd gladly pay for something prettier: - UI is inconsistent: layouts/fonts/icons vary by screen and surface - UX buries common features (e.g. reply, reaction) and promotes uncommon features (e.g. invite new user). UX is rough, e.g. click-targets are tiny and not always obvious, and features are hidden behind mouseover. - promotes the name "Zulip" all over, which is a problem for users who don't know what a Zulip is or why they'd want one, e.g. emails from "Zulip" and not the name of the community. - needs a way to "nudge" conversations into a smaller set of topics/threads, e.g. suggestions. - conversation UI still suffers from scaling issues and needs some reddit-like way to display larger conversations... - no way to control which previews are shown/hidden Seriously, pls hire a no-nonsense designer and stop trying to be clever! UI/UX is too important in this category of product, and the current design holds back adoption.
- jinushaun 5y ago
  My main problem with Zulip is that it seems like a bunch of vi/emac users got together and developed a GUI chat app. It’s impossible to use for new uswrs. But once you become a power user and learn all the keyboard shortcuts it’s great.
- alya 5y ago
  Head of Product for Zulip here. We appreciate the feedback! We are actively recruiting for a designer role (https://zulip.com/jobs/#designer https://zulip.com/jobs/#designer), and making these types of improvements will be a major priority in the coming year.
  - stavros 5y ago
    I agree with the OP, but I have to say that your keyboard navigation is second to none. Also, please keep Zulip fast, it's the biggest reason why it's so great to use.
brunoqc 5y ago
Where is Matrix support for zulip-style threads? It's been a while.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  My understanding is that it exists already in the spec (and I think Synapse might even support it??). It is just that no clients have implemented it yet... IIRC, the Element team has been working on it, but they seem very hesitant to release anything around threads that is half-baked. They really want to get them right the first time!
worker767424 5y ago
I'm surprised more SaaS offerings don't have clauses setting out generous migration times in the event of acquisition or bankruptcy and funds set aside to keep the service up during this time. I'd also like to see terms that limit data use so that these companies can't just be bought for their data.
Sytten 5y ago
One critical element in the article that is brushed aside too fast is that the founders did cash out by selling it to Dropbox first. It is easy to say: "build an open source, slow growing business it is way better" when you have a fat bank account... The reality for most people is that even if you want to build a sustainable business founders also need to pay their bills and the VC route right now fills that need. Is it ideal? No. But until we have another model I won't judge founders for taking VC money.

166 points by williamstein 5y ago

Love Zulip. Structured conversations are possible, which is what i want for a business setting. Topics are a great implementation. Code syntax highlighting and code playgrounds are nifty

usr1106 5y ago
Exactltly, they are technically possible. However, you always have the non-technical people who create complete nonsense topics instead of using a matching existing one. And also some disorganized engineers who continue off-topic discussions for dozens of messages. Switching to a suitable topic when the discussion gets carried away could probably get more user-friendly support. You can edit the topic of existing messages, but there is no completion for existing topics and there is no clear indication of what got moved from where by whom and no simple undo if things go wrong.

aidenn0 5y ago

Zulip is the only thing I've seen recently that does better group conversations around particular topics better than NNTP and e-mail did 30 years ago. I've only used it for a few things since there are network effects around any communications technology but unlike slack or discord, I'm actually pleased when it's the communication medium of choice for a project.

postpawl 5y ago
Slack’s threads suck compared to Zulip’s. In Slack, threads only notify thread participants unless you choose to send it to the channel too, which defeats the purpose of threads by interrupting other conversations. In Zulip, everything in the channel/stream must be a thread, kinda like email.
- stavros 5y ago
  Zulip does most things better than Slack. I can't stand Slack, it's slow, bloated, and the UX is bad. Zulip's UX is a breath of fresh air. It's just so quick to catch up on old messages, mute irrelevant threads, see everything in chronological order, zoom in or out... I just love it.
  - spurgu 5y ago
    I've been using Zulip daily for over a month now and I love it! As do my colleagues who are now very happy users. Looking forward to whenever Zulip implements /digress. That's something I realized was missing right from the start - how to "branch out" from a topic into a new one, creating some sort of sign/breadcrumb indicating that the message got a reply in a new topic. Currently you can quote reply and change the topic for the new message, but there's no indication in the original topic that there was a digression, so discovery is a bit clunky. Original issue: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/14522 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/14522 Some work done and demos: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16589 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/16589 Discussion: https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/.2Fdigress https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/.2Fdi...
- cracell 5y ago
  I have no idea how Slack threads are intended to be used. Their own examples are very trivial and the implementation feels like like a first pass that they never did any usability testing with.
  - warmfuzzykitten 5y ago
    Slack threads seem designed to ensure you can't follow a conversation without branching off into numerous sidetracks, which are hard to find when you're directly addressed.

nousermane 5y ago

Zulip is implementing the same bad architecture as google/ms/apple/fb's messengers (custom protocol, no federation), but at least it does it well (open source, usable, do-one-thing-well, no dark patterns, powerful and stable API).

duped 5y ago
How is it "bad" if it's the standard used by the most successful messenger platforms
- rcthompson 5y ago
  Because there isn't a standard. The point is each one implements their own protocol instead of adapting a standard such as Matrix or XMPP. (Whether any suitable standard exists (much less existed in 2012!) is another issue, but regardless it's fair to say that the current state of things is not ideal.)
  - duped 5y ago
    I don't think "whether any suitable standard exists" is another issue, it's the exact one. If you're building a product and there is no standard to cover core technology, you roll your own because it's faster than waiting for someone else to invent one. But that said I don't think "using a standard protocol" is a value in and of itself.
    - jlkuester7 5y ago
      > But that said I don't think "using a standard protocol" is a value in and of itself. Standard protocols are very valuable if you care about reach while avoiding vendor-lock-in. I want to be able to self-host my server (or pay someone to host it for me), but I also want to be able to communicate with people on other servers. It is that balance of control and networking that is really powerful. Someone else mentioned here about how FHIR uses Zulip as the group chat for their community. That is great! But, to participate, you need an account on their instance and then if you want to participate in multiple Zulip instances you either need multiple clients or some kind of multi-instance support in your client. And then you still have to manage separate profiles for each instance, etc, etc... OTOH, a bunch of open source projects use Matrix instances for their community chat rooms. One of the huge benefits I see from that is that I can use my single Matrix account (on the server that I host) to join all the different communities that I am interested in. (And now with the new Spaces feature in Element, there is even better controls over being able to still retain a separation of concerns between all the different conversations I am a part of...)

romwell 5y ago

Saving this post for after the test comes

akvadrako 5y ago

I've looked at Zulip for a local group and there a couple big problems that prevented me from considering it as a Slack replacement: 1. The UI is unattractive and over-crowded. Introducing non-techies to it would require saying at least "it looks bad at first, but you'll learn to like it." 2. It's complicated to deploy. Not just a simple docker container or anything.

nousermane 5y ago
> complicated to deploy. Not just a simple docker container or anything. Huh? https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip
- azundo 5y ago
  > Project status: Alpha. While this project works and is used by many sites in production, configuring is substantially more error-prone than the normal Zulip installer (which Just Works). There is a docker container but as Zulip themselves say, it is not simple to deploy.
- vetinari 5y ago
  Yes, and when you update docker container 4.8-0 to 4.8-1, it crashes on startup complaining about missing columns. As the sibling commenter said, it is alpha.
mushufasa 5y ago
2. also literally one click here https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/zulip https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/zulip
- vetinari 5y ago
  Initial launch is easy, but try to update from one release to another. You will have to, when the security releases will be out. Solving issues like why it doesn't connect to it's own redis instance anymore, when only its own script touch the config. Not very funny times.

JaggerJo 5y ago

The client is a piece of shit tho. Posted to the wrong channel/topic more than once now.. A native mac app would be a game changer. Would pay for it.

jlkuester7 5y ago

Hooray for Zulip! It is a ready great example of the amazing things that can be accomplished by an open source community (and founder's like Tim Abbott who understand how to prioritize that community and its users). Thank you for your work!

bawolff 5y ago

Meh. Open source isn't magic. It can still fail just like anything else.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
I see people downvoting this, but while it may not be artfully phrased it's absolutely true. There are countless small projects which fell by the wayside because they didn't get enough users to build a true community (e.g., "Ted," a "Rich Text Processor" that was, about 20 years ago, my favorite WYSIWYG-ish open source word processor) -- and even some relatively big name ones that were created by one company that just didn't get traction when the company stopped supporting them. Google Wave was already mentioned in the comments on this artlce and it counts; another one was the company I was at in the mid-2010s: RethinkDB. AFAIK, there's only been one minor release since the company folded and I think that release was the one that was "in progress" when the doors shut. Zulip seems like it's in a much better place to survive, taking the word of the article, with an active development community around it. (I don't think I've actually heard of Zulip after the original company was bought by Dropbox, although "whether chipotle_coyote has heard of this" is admittedly not a leading indicator of success.)
mlinksva 5y ago
The "why" in the article doesn't rest on open source being magic: - building company without VC - 100% open source, easy to self-host, high quality import/export - building software so that it is easy to maintain and operate - substantial community of developers (100+ commits) beyond those employed by company Open source as magic seems like at most 25% of the argument, more charitably 10%.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I think a good point of comparison would be phabricator. It meets much of the same criteria (although much is subjective of course). Look where phabricator is now.
  - mlinksva 5y ago

zwkrt 5y ago

And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

svieira 5y ago
Though under the earth and throneless now I be Yet, while I lived, all the earth was under me.
easton_s 5y ago
If you cross any bridges watchout for Liam Neeson.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
circularfoyers 5y ago
I heard Richard Attenborough's voice in my head as I read this[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX0oubhFydc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX0oubhFydc
- vinaypai 5y ago
  I heard it in Leonard Nemoy's voice, discovering the Contstruction technology in Civilization 4.

terpimost 5y ago

At start I was a bit afraid of Zulip but after a while I get used to it. It works pretty good and fast. I hope someday it would be possible to easily extract topics or messages into some knowledge base

strifel 5y ago
probably pretty easy using the API. https://zulip.com/api/ https://zulip.com/api/

joshuakelly 5y ago

Zulip is used for the FHIR community (chat.fhir.org) and it manages to deliver a much more "email thread"/async communication stream. It's almost closer to a Hacker News than one of the dozens/hundreds of forgettable Slack/Discords for other communities.

bachmeier 5y ago

Maybe a better title would be "Why your Zulip data will stand the test of time". I think that's really the point he's making: the company will be fine, but even if something bad does happen, you won't be left hanging. With respect to Zulip the company, I think they have a great product, but they need to market themselves as being something differen from chat/Slack. Zulip is built from the ground up to support a very different workflow. I guess most people try Zulip because they're looking for a Slack competitor and they get the wrong product. If I were Richard Stallman, I would suggest ZINC (Zulip is not chat) as an alias, and everyone would adopt it because Slack is not a recursive acronym.[0] [0] YMMV

cmroanirgo 5y ago
Although this bug report [0] states the difficulties facing them, zulip doesn't do e2e, which is a deal breaker for many communities. So, a title as you suggest should be "Why your Zulip data will stand the test of time, provided no one steals it". Aren't we a long way down the road of understanding that all server systems should be regarded as an "untrust" environment? I feel this way about my own self hosted systems. If your critical data leaks, you're hosed. If corporate needs to have audit trails then there needs to be a system that deliberately breaks e2e, something that all clients posting on that system know about and display messages about, rather than the current implementation. About server side search... that's a different issue, but couldn't it be done with hashing keywords on the client and a disclaimer on how this may reduce security? So, all in all, I get why e2e is hard for zulip, but standing the test of time without it could be difficult. [0] https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096
- bachmeier 5y ago
  I don't think Slack offers e2e. If they do, it's a recent development.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I don't see any value for e2e on a team chat. With e2e you lose not only server-side search but also message archives for new users (and new clients for old users too, if you use something with forward secrecy). In exchange, it makes hacking the server prevent leakage. Meanwhile if even a single client gets hacked, all of your group-chats are still compromised. A big part of the value of something like Zulip versus e-mail is you can link to historical threads, and know that everyone can read them. E2E is purposefully hostile towards "everyone reading them" so it's a major tradeoff. Do you want E2E on your bugtracker? CI logs? Doing so for Zulip makes about as much sense IMO. Note that if GH used E2E for issues (which is arguably a form of group chat), the link you posted to the discussion would not be readable by me.

hadlock 5y ago

At my last company we had an open rebellion against using Zulip for at least two years, before the product team budgeted for slack enterprise and the engineering team switched to that for DMs, although formal communication still happened through zulip to appease our VP. The mac client was never fast, search was neigh impossible to use across 7 years of messages and there were frequent issues with client stability and drop outs. More than once I've seen someone "mark all messages as read" and cause the service to crash. "Is zulip down?" was a sort of running joke among the engineers. I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision.

Zigurd 5y ago
I used it for chat and automated notifications related to a git workflow, both the repos and chat were self-hosted. It was far less polished than Slack (and Slack was not that polished back then). But fine for that purpose. In less tech centric environments the rough edges are more bothersome.
serial_dev 5y ago
> I wouldn't turn down a job solely based upon their reliance on a tool like Zulip, but it would definitely be a factor in my decision. This resonated with me, at my current company hundreds (maybe thousands, I don't know) of employees' daily chat goes through a self hosted RocketChat instance. For all I know, based on the performance, that server is running on the cheapest Raspberry Pi. Everyone on the team just kind of accepted that sometimes, you can't connect for minutes (sometimes hours), the search is slow and not very powerful, the features and integrations are lacking. It's so frustrating when you want to contact someone, you can't, because it won't load, if you want to add an integration (that you are used to from your last company and would make things much easier for everyone), you can't, because there are no good integrations for RocketChat. In my opinion, terrible internal chat and penny pinching is a good sign of a dysfunctional organization. Ten dollars per employee per month sounds expensive, until you realize that your employees wait an hour a week for the self hosted tool to load and are now blocked because of that.
- 5y ago

wellthisisgreat 5y ago

Switched to Zulip from Slack and then Teams and LOVE it. We did a ton of research into what team messenger we could use and, frankly, I have no idea what could be a better alternative to Zulip. Discord forces to use one account everywhere, Slack sucks for search and threads and causes too much noise and clutter, Teams , well we are still recovering from the emotional and productivity damaged it caused. What else is there?

bachmeier 5y ago
Twist
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  > Twist Hmm, I assume you are talking about https://twist.com/ https://twist.com/ This is the first time looking at that service and I find it equally intriguing and confusing. It seems like a cross between Slack and Notion (ideally capturing the best of both worlds). But I would love to hear from someone who has actually used it regarding its benefits vs other chat systems...
ngrilly 5y ago
How many employees? What is the company doing? Is it mainly tech? Asking because people in my group were a bit disappointed by Zulip UI.
- wellthisisgreat 5y ago
  10, all tech plus designers. The UI is minimal but it also doesn’t get in the way and the topics really help keep things in check
  - ngrilly 5y ago
    In a context similar to yours, I'd definitely use Zulip.
- spurgu 5y ago

wolverine876 5y ago

> "Will this product still exist and be responsibly maintained in a few years?" / This question is harder to answer than it might seem. A publicly-traded company may be unlikely to go out of business, but large companies (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Atlassian) routinely abandon products. A startup that has raised a flashy round of VC funding may soon (like Quill) be acquired with the intent to shut down its product, or go out of business altogether. The safest products on this front are likely large open-source projects with a broad community, like Python, Linux, or PostgreSQL. Enterprise software companies also generally provide long-term support and backward compatibility. Look at Microsoft and Windows. OS/2 by IBM, first released 1987, flopped in the marketplace. IBM supported it for ~20 years, then licensed others to support it. People often reject the added expense of enterprise software, but you get what you pay for.

jlkuester7 5y ago
> Enterprise software companies also generally provide long-term support and backward compatibility Honest question for anyone familiar with enterprise SAAS contracts: does the same apply? I mean sure, I have seem MS/Oracle provide crazy-long support for some of their software offerings, but if MS decided one day to pivot away from Teams, is there any clauses in the 365 contracts that prevent them from just shutting down the servers?
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > is there any clauses in the 365 contracts that prevent them from just shutting down the servers? The clause is in their reputation: If they did that, they would lose a lot of corporate business for all their products. > SAAS However, could they raise prices substantially ...?

stagger87 5y ago

So he sold the original company/product, then got it released as open source, and built another company based on it? Nice...

asah 5y ago

Love Zulip! Simple architecture, amazing packaging release/upgrade process and very developer friendly at all levels! I actually pulled away from Facebook, invited everyone to a Zulip server, hacked on it to provide changes people wanted, and we're loving it. Login-with-Google was trivial to setup. Some users prefer to email the server and the gateway was so easy to setup. Search Just Worked(tm). It's fast. It's easy to admin. and and and... I have only one complaint... but it's a biggie: the UI/UX. I don't normally care, but literally every one of my users has commented that it's an ugly duckling - both the mobile app and website. We'd gladly pay for something prettier: - UI is inconsistent: layouts/fonts/icons vary by screen and surface - UX buries common features (e.g. reply, reaction) and promotes uncommon features (e.g. invite new user). UX is rough, e.g. click-targets are tiny and not always obvious, and features are hidden behind mouseover. - promotes the name "Zulip" all over, which is a problem for users who don't know what a Zulip is or why they'd want one, e.g. emails from "Zulip" and not the name of the community. - needs a way to "nudge" conversations into a smaller set of topics/threads, e.g. suggestions. - conversation UI still suffers from scaling issues and needs some reddit-like way to display larger conversations... - no way to control which previews are shown/hidden Seriously, pls hire a no-nonsense designer and stop trying to be clever! UI/UX is too important in this category of product, and the current design holds back adoption.

jinushaun 5y ago
My main problem with Zulip is that it seems like a bunch of vi/emac users got together and developed a GUI chat app. It’s impossible to use for new uswrs. But once you become a power user and learn all the keyboard shortcuts it’s great.
alya 5y ago
Head of Product for Zulip here. We appreciate the feedback! We are actively recruiting for a designer role (https://zulip.com/jobs/#designer https://zulip.com/jobs/#designer), and making these types of improvements will be a major priority in the coming year.
- stavros 5y ago
  I agree with the OP, but I have to say that your keyboard navigation is second to none. Also, please keep Zulip fast, it's the biggest reason why it's so great to use.

brunoqc 5y ago

Where is Matrix support for zulip-style threads? It's been a while.

jlkuester7 5y ago
My understanding is that it exists already in the spec (and I think Synapse might even support it??). It is just that no clients have implemented it yet... IIRC, the Element team has been working on it, but they seem very hesitant to release anything around threads that is half-baked. They really want to get them right the first time!

worker767424 5y ago

I'm surprised more SaaS offerings don't have clauses setting out generous migration times in the event of acquisition or bankruptcy and funds set aside to keep the service up during this time. I'd also like to see terms that limit data use so that these companies can't just be bought for their data.

Sytten 5y ago

One critical element in the article that is brushed aside too fast is that the founders did cash out by selling it to Dropbox first. It is easy to say: "build an open source, slow growing business it is way better" when you have a fat bank account... The reality for most people is that even if you want to build a sustainable business founders also need to pay their bills and the VC route right now fills that need. Is it ideal? No. But until we have another model I won't judge founders for taking VC money.