9 ms·

Zulip 5.0: Threaded open-source team chat

356 points by srijan4 5y ago

JCWasmx86 5y ago
I use it at work, well it's a nice thing. But the only thing that is annoying, if I want to copy text by double clicking, it adds the sender to it. (E.g. If I want to copy $COMMAND, "$SENDER_NAME: $COMMAND" is copied into the clipboard)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- asah 5y ago
  hunh, this doesn't seem right. I just tested the behavior on https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/ and it copied just the text. try it again on that server?
  - JCWasmx86 5y ago
    In the browser on Fedora/Firefox, it works too, but maybe it is an issue with the desktop application
immortaljoe 5y ago
I got introduced to Zulip through recurse center (which still uses Zulip). I prefer it over slack, mostly cause i check the recurse Zulip once in few months and the threaded conversations make it so easy to follow and skip topics. Really wish my workplace used it instead of slack :(
dijit 5y ago
Nothing but love for Zulip honestly. But getting my company to switch from slack or teams seems to be impossible. For a good example of how great Zulip can be: the rust-lang zulip instance is a shining example. https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html
- pm90 5y ago
  Same, love Zulip but slack seems too entrenched at the moment. I'm hoping that OSS communities continue adopting it and using it instead of slack though.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    Meanwhile in Europe, where Slack never made much of a dent, Teams seems to be eating everything. ... which is frustrating, because its Linux desktop app is still quite poor and buggy in the basics.
    - sandermvanvliet 5y ago
      I might be living in a different Europe than you but from what I see around my Slack is very pervasive and Teams is only used for video meetings because companies are already on office365. Nothing but hate for the chat/collaboration features…
      - trulyme 5y ago
        There seem to be quite a few Europes around. The one I live in uses mostly Zoom, with some Teams, Skype, Slack and even Jitsi thrown in the mix. Yeah, Teams is the worst of them in every dimension.
        sho_hn 5y ago
        We used to be on Zoom for video meetings, then it lost favor due to fears of industrial espionage (the encryption crisis, etc.) and via Office 365, Teams snuck up. Initially as a Zoom replacement only for video meetings, too, but lately folks seem to be discovering the other functionality and it's creeping in. Atlassian (Confluence/JIRA) otherwise.
        trulyme 5y ago
        Not a fan of Zoom myself, just - it seems to be used quite a lot around me. For me Jitsi is king for video conferencing. Sorry about Jira. :)
bifrost 5y ago
I tried using Zulip, nobody else wanted to use it because it was so clunky. I appreciate what they're trying to do but as someone who's been using internet based chat for 30 years (oof), I don't think its going to catch on until you can turn off the "thread only" mode.
- epolanski 5y ago
  I think the "thread-only" feature is the biggest selling point, it's niche-y by default. Zulip is the meeting point of a hackernews/reddit-like board, real time chats and mailing lists. UX and UI needs work, but the base concept is its main feature. I participate in two different zulip's, the microsoft rush one and the functional programming one and I always felt Zulip was the best choice for technical discussions. Threads discourage spam and off topic, searching discussions and topics you care about is simpler. If you come from 3 decades of IRC it gets time to get used to, but it's great in everything IRC is unfit.
  - spockz 5y ago
    And if you don’t want it, use a “General” thread? Or basically a thread like a channel?
- wellthisisgreat 5y ago
  Thread mode is the selling point for us. I’ve been in various chats since late 90s, and threads aren’t exactly a cookie-cutter IRC thing, that other chats are doing, but it does wonder for organizing the flow of inforamtion
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  Thread only is the biggest reason to use it outside of FOSS, but the UI design and overall experience could use some work. It's not bad, but for apps like Zulip that are different from what people are used to, it can make a big difference.
gavinray 5y ago
I'm not going to lie -- I was forced to use Zulip because the Redhatters on the Quarkus team use it for their community chat. At first I thought it was terrible, but after a while it grew on me. The thread-first design makes it a lot easier to navigate, and you can optionally choose the "standard" chat view where all the threads + replies are lumped together in a channel's stream. Great product, thanks for all the hard work =)
- asah 5y ago
  Same experience with my users: day 1: why do I need another app/website/etc day 2: ok fine, but what's with the threading? day 3: whoa, this is pretty nice. day 4: <feature request> day 5: <feature request is live> day 6: mind blown
newuser33441890 5y ago
dmix 5y ago
I kinda like the idea of 'resolving threads'. You could create a temporary war room for a particular issue then close it as needed. Although I doubt our company is big enough where it makes sense to segregate beyond job divisions.
wellthisisgreat 5y ago
Zulip is amazing we use it daily. Head and shoulders above Slack and Teams that we tried before
paxys 5y ago
I used Zulip for a while in one of my communities and quite liked it. It could use a lot more polishing (maybe the newer versions are better in that regard), but it brought a lot of innovation to the table compared to something like Mattermost, whose only goal is to be a pixel-by-pixel copy of Slack.
kibwen 5y ago
Zulip is fantastic. It mixes the paradigms of IRC and email while providing a clean interface that runs beautifully in a browser. The Rust language developers use it and I couldn't imagine any better way to keep up with the volume of so many discussions across so many teams. However, the mobile app could use a whole lot of polish. I rarely use chat apps on my phone, but if I did then I wouldn't have nearly as good an impression of Zulip as I do.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  This is arguably one of the biggest strengths of Matrix: there are a zillion clients for almost every imaginable platform, and lots and lots of libraries so integrations are a breeze. You don't need to violate the ToS (discord), get API keys/permission and agree to conditions (Slack), and so on, in order to do your own implementation. Governments (including military), health care, and large enterprise have been moving to Matrix. It's enough of a threat that Slack had to get off their asses and actually "innovate" some cross-slack messaging. Threading and more integrated A/V is what's missing, and both are supposedly in the works, but they seem to be perpetually "coming soon"...
  - kibwen 5y ago
    Sure, I like federation and I think it would be nice if Zulip were federated (maybe it is, I actually don't know!). My comment is just about the user experience, though.
  - paraknight 5y ago
    I really wanted to love Matrix but it just doesn't cut it yet. I hope it gets there in the coming years, rather than go the way of XMPP, but atm, I can no longer in good conscience try to convince people to give Matrix a shot, if it fails at covering the most basic use case: reliable communication. There aren't as many clients as you think, and the majority of them are quite bad. The only client with any firepower behind it is Element, and the UX is really not great there, and there are a lot of critical bugs that have been open for years, with nobody with enough knowledge of the codebase able to go in and fix these (especially with E2E encryption). As far as I can tell, their $30 mil raise has gone into focusing on enterprise instead. Matrix bridges are buggy and decaying because the main ones are maintained by basically one guy who's now focusing on building proprietary products around his work (fair enough). This is irrespective of the whole federation side, which is also buggy, and until the setup/maintenance cost of running your own homeserver (pure P2P federation and homeserver-agnostic identities have been TODO for years!), it's not gonna catch on. Even today, Matrix is hardly decentralised -- compare the matrix.org homeserver with literally the sum of all other homeservers and you'll see.
asah 5y ago
WOOT !!! Zulip is amazing and this is a big release. In particular, the source code and dev process are truly delightful, and I've painlessly made all sorts of custom mods to it, from UI to backend. Most systems of its size are "open source in name only" but not Zulip.
vijaybritto 5y ago
We use this at work and its so good at keeping things in track! We never loose any conversations. Compared to Teams this is so good. I would pick this any day over Teams/Discord where things get lost all the time.
cecilpl2 5y ago
Nice to see Zulip is still around! I was the Zulip evangelist at a previous company, but sadly was never able to get buy-in from senior leadership on the advantages of a real-time chat system. I contributed a couple of integrations that I'm happy to see are still active. :) My lesson from that project was that there can only be one canonical communication system due to the network effect, and that communication will naturally gravitate to whichever system senior leadership is using. Years later the company settled on Slack instead, driven by a new exec.
- regularfry 5y ago
  Hah, this is funny. We have, that I know of, five "canonical" communication systems that are all big enough to survive because of network effects and corporate sponsorship in different parts of the company.
moksha256 5y ago
The public access feature looks sweet...and I was able to use it to access demos of the upcoming redesign of the Zulip web application. Do any alternatives offer this ability to see content without having to sign up for an account? Slack et al are walled gardens because none of their content is publicly available...forums are the opposite, but they lack the real-time dynamic of chat. This public access feature from Zulip seems like it might bridge the gap nicely.
throw0101a 5y ago
Regarding threading generally: perhaps it's just me and my Usenet habits, but I find threads really helpful in keeping a chat channel relatively 'clean'. However trying to get conversations to actually occur in them seems to be an uphill battle with other (non-techy?) people, and often things 'degenerate' into a stream-of-consciousness series of messages. Is it just that I'm atypical in preferring them? Do 'normal' people have a hard time with (understanding) them? Other?
- tfehring 5y ago
  For better or worse, I think Slack’s approach of opt-in threading is effectively the default at this point. If users’ (technical or otherwise) mental model assumes that messages can get sent to a channel, but the software only allows messages to be sent to a thread, that disconnect could result in lots of unexpected behaviors. For what it’s worth, I personally prefer Slack’s approach over Zulip’s - I think threading is a really important feature, but requiring it for every message creates excessive and unnecessary friction.
  - conradludgate 5y ago
    I think if you could type a message, and it could use some heuristic to determine a sensible thread title for you automatically, that would improve the experience quite a bit
    - tfehring 5y ago
      Yeah, I think that would help a lot. I think I’d personally go a step further and make thread titles optional, I generally don’t think they add much value over just reading the first message in the thread. Even with that change, though, I’d still rather have threading be opt-in. Not every message fits well into exactly one thread.
  - gilbertbw 5y ago
    Personally I’ve found the ability to move messages between / split threads (topics) helps a lot with this in Zulip. We moved from Slack, and those that struggled with threading there mostly picked it up over a few weeks.
alexklark 5y ago
- qwertox 5y ago
  I think a dose of fresh air would do you good.
jessegavin 5y ago
So basically Zulip > Slack because it has nested channels?
vosper 5y ago
Interesting that hosted Zulip has the same per-user monthly pricing as Slack. Slack runs around an 80% gross margin, I wonder how Zulip does. Is Zulip as featureful as Slack? You can do a lot with and in Slack these days.
the_common_man 5y ago
love zulip, great team!
walrus01 5y ago
what does this accomplish that a self-hosted matrix/synapse setup doesn't? the synapse daemon is not overly complicated to set up in a non-federated configuration. the official matrix client is pretty good, there are also a wide choice of other matrix protocol clients people can use to connect.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  The UI is nicer than any of the matrix clients that I've seen. If you don't need federation, Zulip is just nicer to use for nontech people.
- maccam94 5y ago
  The main differentiator of Zulip IMO is the threading model. Instead of chat rooms with multiple un-separated concurrent conversations taking place, every message* must start a topic or be placed in one (topics are like the subject line in an email). You can still look at the room and see all of the topics at once, but you can also focus in on a single topic. And it remembers your read progress at a per-topic level, so it's quite feasible to catch up on chats asynchronously. Basically Zulip brings the best things about mailing lists to chat. *: you can now turn off the topic requirement, in which case messages go into a "no topic" topic. But not using topics kind of defeats the purpose of using Zulip IMO.
- DoItToMe81 5y ago
  Zulip has many features that no Matrix client currently has.
eliudprom1 5y ago
noobermin 5y ago
Perhaps it's the "free tier" hosting (I don't have enough time or desire to figure out self-hosting) leaves a lot to be desired. Images are sometimes slow to load and the image upload from a phone is a little bit janky, especially compared to Slack. I primarily use it for a sort of photo sharing log with my fiance, and I convinced her to do it for "open source," so perhaps I'm not the intended audience.
awill 5y ago
Dropbox bought this and then open sourced it, right? Did they buy the company only for talent, and not the product? Why didn't Dropbox try to actually use it to compete with Slack? Teams is terrible, but integrated. Slack is better, but isolated from good video/storage. It does seem there's room for a third option.
rstarast 5y ago
I'd love to work somewhere that uses Zulip over Slack, for the product itself, but particularly because I believe it has a good chance of coming with a more mindful communication approach than your average Slack shop. Anyone hiring?
- lanstein 5y ago
  raises hand You’re spot on.
lastdong 5y ago
Congrats Zulip team! Amazing milestone, and hoping many more celebrations ahead
DreamFlasher 5y ago
It still doesn't have e2e encryption. It's unfortunate that they reinvented the wheel instead of using a great protocol (matrix) and focusing on writing a great client.
- mrbabbage 5y ago
  Zulip came out in 2012, which predates Matrix.
  - klysm 5y ago
    Then they must’ve pre-invented it!
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    They obviously should've used a time machine.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  It generally doesn't need e2e encryption, because it's strictly public or strictly inside-the-firewall. If it had federation capabilities, or people wanted to use private groups, it would need e2e. I hope that's on their drawing board.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Right. As long as you are accessing the site over SSL and your server is secured, then you really have a form of e2e.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  E2EE doesn't really work in large chatrooms on Matrix either. I don't know how many large groups you're in on Matrix but just as a most-recent example, the Garage folks just tombstoned their E2EE room for a public one because Matrix still isn't ready for large-format E2EE encrypted chats. Search history is painful and most often previous chats will show up as "waiting..." forever so there's zero context coming in.
tiffanyh 5y ago
For those who don't like the UI design, there's significant work happening to freshening it up. See the discussion (and mockups) below. https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/UI.20redesign https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/UI.20... Congrats to this team for the product they deliver and service they provide.
- presentation 5y ago
  That’s good to hear - always just seemed really clunky and therefore harder so we’ll my team on than pretty-looking slack.
dang 5y ago
Related: Zulip Cloud security vulnerability with reusable invitation links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479430 - Feb 2022 (35 comments) Why Zulip will stand the test of time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595926 - Dec 2021 (80 comments) Why Zulip will not get on the blockchain bandwagon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29205346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29205346 - Nov 2021 (195 comments) Zulip 4.0: Threaded open source team chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149123 - May 2021 (170 comments) Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860338 - July 2020 (133 comments) Zulip 2.0: Open source team chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284321 - March 2019 (96 comments) Zulip Server 1.9: HipChat import and much more - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400988 - Nov 2018 (123 comments) Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622987 - July 2018 (99 comments) Slack channels are a waste of time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622707 - July 2018 (49 comments) Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675 - April 2018 (148 comments) Zulip Server 1.6 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14506426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14506426 - June 2017 (14 comments) Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961 - Sept 2015 (313 comments) Dropbox Acquires Zulip, A Stealthy Workplace Chat Solution Still In Private Beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7419408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7419408 - March 2014 (14 comments)
gnulinux 5y ago
Zulip is pretty excellent. It's been a communication booster for the company I'm working for. Unfortunately, after almost 4 years they switched to Slack and Slack imho is terrible. Zulip to Slack was like going from Python to C I still feel disoriented to this day.
DoItToMe81 5y ago
I love the concept of Zulip, but my experience with multiple setups, and even their official chat, is that it becomes incredibly choppy and laggy when scrolling through a bulk of messages. Has this been fixed?
- tabbott 5y ago
  Hi! Being able to scroll through messages quickly has been a core design goal for the Zulip web application from the beginning, and we're not aware of any significant regressions here, so I'd like to get to the bottom of it. I'd love it if you reported what you're experiencing in #frontend in chat.zulip.org. We'll want to collect a profile from your browser, so we can figure out why you're seeing choppy scrolling.
  - DoItToMe81 5y ago
    I'm going to be busy for the next few days, but when I get the time I definitely will.
merdaverse 5y ago
Apart from being open source, which is great, I don't get the main selling point of this. How are topics any different from threads in Slack? It seems to me that if people stick to using threads in Slack (which they usually do in my experience) you would have the same experience no?
mikecoles 5y ago
Zulip is amazing. The only feature I miss is legitimate federation. Everything else it does is top shelf.
roamerz 5y ago
Been live with Zulip at work for just over a year now. Works great for our use model and love the fact that we are able to self host - which also helps greatly with our compliance requirements. The code is rock solid as far as server stability is concerned and are maybe 1 defect and 1 enhancement away from it being perfect. Nice work Team Zulip.

356 points by srijan4 5y ago

I use it at work, well it's a nice thing. But the only thing that is annoying, if I want to copy text by double clicking, it adds the sender to it. (E.g. If I want to copy $COMMAND, "$SENDER_NAME: $COMMAND" is copied into the clipboard)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
asah 5y ago
hunh, this doesn't seem right. I just tested the behavior on https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/ and it copied just the text. try it again on that server?
- JCWasmx86 5y ago
  In the browser on Fedora/Firefox, it works too, but maybe it is an issue with the desktop application

immortaljoe 5y ago

I got introduced to Zulip through recurse center (which still uses Zulip). I prefer it over slack, mostly cause i check the recurse Zulip once in few months and the threaded conversations make it so easy to follow and skip topics. Really wish my workplace used it instead of slack :(

dijit 5y ago

Nothing but love for Zulip honestly. But getting my company to switch from slack or teams seems to be impossible. For a good example of how great Zulip can be: the rust-lang zulip instance is a shining example. https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platforms/zulip.html

pm90 5y ago
Same, love Zulip but slack seems too entrenched at the moment. I'm hoping that OSS communities continue adopting it and using it instead of slack though.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  Meanwhile in Europe, where Slack never made much of a dent, Teams seems to be eating everything. ... which is frustrating, because its Linux desktop app is still quite poor and buggy in the basics.
  - sandermvanvliet 5y ago
    I might be living in a different Europe than you but from what I see around my Slack is very pervasive and Teams is only used for video meetings because companies are already on office365. Nothing but hate for the chat/collaboration features…
    - trulyme 5y ago
      There seem to be quite a few Europes around. The one I live in uses mostly Zoom, with some Teams, Skype, Slack and even Jitsi thrown in the mix. Yeah, Teams is the worst of them in every dimension.
      - sho_hn 5y ago
        We used to be on Zoom for video meetings, then it lost favor due to fears of industrial espionage (the encryption crisis, etc.) and via Office 365, Teams snuck up. Initially as a Zoom replacement only for video meetings, too, but lately folks seem to be discovering the other functionality and it's creeping in. Atlassian (Confluence/JIRA) otherwise.
        trulyme 5y ago
        Not a fan of Zoom myself, just - it seems to be used quite a lot around me. For me Jitsi is king for video conferencing. Sorry about Jira. :)

bifrost 5y ago

I tried using Zulip, nobody else wanted to use it because it was so clunky. I appreciate what they're trying to do but as someone who's been using internet based chat for 30 years (oof), I don't think its going to catch on until you can turn off the "thread only" mode.

epolanski 5y ago
I think the "thread-only" feature is the biggest selling point, it's niche-y by default. Zulip is the meeting point of a hackernews/reddit-like board, real time chats and mailing lists. UX and UI needs work, but the base concept is its main feature. I participate in two different zulip's, the microsoft rush one and the functional programming one and I always felt Zulip was the best choice for technical discussions. Threads discourage spam and off topic, searching discussions and topics you care about is simpler. If you come from 3 decades of IRC it gets time to get used to, but it's great in everything IRC is unfit.
- spockz 5y ago
  And if you don’t want it, use a “General” thread? Or basically a thread like a channel?
wellthisisgreat 5y ago
Thread mode is the selling point for us. I’ve been in various chats since late 90s, and threads aren’t exactly a cookie-cutter IRC thing, that other chats are doing, but it does wonder for organizing the flow of inforamtion
agentdrtran 5y ago
Thread only is the biggest reason to use it outside of FOSS, but the UI design and overall experience could use some work. It's not bad, but for apps like Zulip that are different from what people are used to, it can make a big difference.

gavinray 5y ago

I'm not going to lie -- I was forced to use Zulip because the Redhatters on the Quarkus team use it for their community chat. At first I thought it was terrible, but after a while it grew on me. The thread-first design makes it a lot easier to navigate, and you can optionally choose the "standard" chat view where all the threads + replies are lumped together in a channel's stream. Great product, thanks for all the hard work =)

asah 5y ago
Same experience with my users: day 1: why do I need another app/website/etc day 2: ok fine, but what's with the threading? day 3: whoa, this is pretty nice. day 4: <feature request> day 5: <feature request is live> day 6: mind blown

newuser33441890 5y ago

dmix 5y ago

I kinda like the idea of 'resolving threads'. You could create a temporary war room for a particular issue then close it as needed. Although I doubt our company is big enough where it makes sense to segregate beyond job divisions.

wellthisisgreat 5y ago

Zulip is amazing we use it daily. Head and shoulders above Slack and Teams that we tried before

paxys 5y ago

I used Zulip for a while in one of my communities and quite liked it. It could use a lot more polishing (maybe the newer versions are better in that regard), but it brought a lot of innovation to the table compared to something like Mattermost, whose only goal is to be a pixel-by-pixel copy of Slack.

kibwen 5y ago

Zulip is fantastic. It mixes the paradigms of IRC and email while providing a clean interface that runs beautifully in a browser. The Rust language developers use it and I couldn't imagine any better way to keep up with the volume of so many discussions across so many teams. However, the mobile app could use a whole lot of polish. I rarely use chat apps on my phone, but if I did then I wouldn't have nearly as good an impression of Zulip as I do.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
This is arguably one of the biggest strengths of Matrix: there are a zillion clients for almost every imaginable platform, and lots and lots of libraries so integrations are a breeze. You don't need to violate the ToS (discord), get API keys/permission and agree to conditions (Slack), and so on, in order to do your own implementation. Governments (including military), health care, and large enterprise have been moving to Matrix. It's enough of a threat that Slack had to get off their asses and actually "innovate" some cross-slack messaging. Threading and more integrated A/V is what's missing, and both are supposedly in the works, but they seem to be perpetually "coming soon"...
- kibwen 5y ago
  Sure, I like federation and I think it would be nice if Zulip were federated (maybe it is, I actually don't know!). My comment is just about the user experience, though.
- paraknight 5y ago
  I really wanted to love Matrix but it just doesn't cut it yet. I hope it gets there in the coming years, rather than go the way of XMPP, but atm, I can no longer in good conscience try to convince people to give Matrix a shot, if it fails at covering the most basic use case: reliable communication. There aren't as many clients as you think, and the majority of them are quite bad. The only client with any firepower behind it is Element, and the UX is really not great there, and there are a lot of critical bugs that have been open for years, with nobody with enough knowledge of the codebase able to go in and fix these (especially with E2E encryption). As far as I can tell, their $30 mil raise has gone into focusing on enterprise instead. Matrix bridges are buggy and decaying because the main ones are maintained by basically one guy who's now focusing on building proprietary products around his work (fair enough). This is irrespective of the whole federation side, which is also buggy, and until the setup/maintenance cost of running your own homeserver (pure P2P federation and homeserver-agnostic identities have been TODO for years!), it's not gonna catch on. Even today, Matrix is hardly decentralised -- compare the matrix.org homeserver with literally the sum of all other homeservers and you'll see.

asah 5y ago

WOOT !!! Zulip is amazing and this is a big release. In particular, the source code and dev process are truly delightful, and I've painlessly made all sorts of custom mods to it, from UI to backend. Most systems of its size are "open source in name only" but not Zulip.

vijaybritto 5y ago

We use this at work and its so good at keeping things in track! We never loose any conversations. Compared to Teams this is so good. I would pick this any day over Teams/Discord where things get lost all the time.

cecilpl2 5y ago

Nice to see Zulip is still around! I was the Zulip evangelist at a previous company, but sadly was never able to get buy-in from senior leadership on the advantages of a real-time chat system. I contributed a couple of integrations that I'm happy to see are still active. :) My lesson from that project was that there can only be one canonical communication system due to the network effect, and that communication will naturally gravitate to whichever system senior leadership is using. Years later the company settled on Slack instead, driven by a new exec.

regularfry 5y ago
Hah, this is funny. We have, that I know of, five "canonical" communication systems that are all big enough to survive because of network effects and corporate sponsorship in different parts of the company.

moksha256 5y ago

The public access feature looks sweet...and I was able to use it to access demos of the upcoming redesign of the Zulip web application. Do any alternatives offer this ability to see content without having to sign up for an account? Slack et al are walled gardens because none of their content is publicly available...forums are the opposite, but they lack the real-time dynamic of chat. This public access feature from Zulip seems like it might bridge the gap nicely.

throw0101a 5y ago

Regarding threading generally: perhaps it's just me and my Usenet habits, but I find threads really helpful in keeping a chat channel relatively 'clean'. However trying to get conversations to actually occur in them seems to be an uphill battle with other (non-techy?) people, and often things 'degenerate' into a stream-of-consciousness series of messages. Is it just that I'm atypical in preferring them? Do 'normal' people have a hard time with (understanding) them? Other?

tfehring 5y ago
For better or worse, I think Slack’s approach of opt-in threading is effectively the default at this point. If users’ (technical or otherwise) mental model assumes that messages can get sent to a channel, but the software only allows messages to be sent to a thread, that disconnect could result in lots of unexpected behaviors. For what it’s worth, I personally prefer Slack’s approach over Zulip’s - I think threading is a really important feature, but requiring it for every message creates excessive and unnecessary friction.
- conradludgate 5y ago
  I think if you could type a message, and it could use some heuristic to determine a sensible thread title for you automatically, that would improve the experience quite a bit
  - tfehring 5y ago
    Yeah, I think that would help a lot. I think I’d personally go a step further and make thread titles optional, I generally don’t think they add much value over just reading the first message in the thread. Even with that change, though, I’d still rather have threading be opt-in. Not every message fits well into exactly one thread.
- gilbertbw 5y ago
  Personally I’ve found the ability to move messages between / split threads (topics) helps a lot with this in Zulip. We moved from Slack, and those that struggled with threading there mostly picked it up over a few weeks.

alexklark 5y ago

qwertox 5y ago
I think a dose of fresh air would do you good.

jessegavin 5y ago

So basically Zulip > Slack because it has nested channels?

vosper 5y ago

Interesting that hosted Zulip has the same per-user monthly pricing as Slack. Slack runs around an 80% gross margin, I wonder how Zulip does. Is Zulip as featureful as Slack? You can do a lot with and in Slack these days.

the_common_man 5y ago

love zulip, great team!

walrus01 5y ago

what does this accomplish that a self-hosted matrix/synapse setup doesn't? the synapse daemon is not overly complicated to set up in a non-federated configuration. the official matrix client is pretty good, there are also a wide choice of other matrix protocol clients people can use to connect.

dsr_ 5y ago
The UI is nicer than any of the matrix clients that I've seen. If you don't need federation, Zulip is just nicer to use for nontech people.
maccam94 5y ago
The main differentiator of Zulip IMO is the threading model. Instead of chat rooms with multiple un-separated concurrent conversations taking place, every message* must start a topic or be placed in one (topics are like the subject line in an email). You can still look at the room and see all of the topics at once, but you can also focus in on a single topic. And it remembers your read progress at a per-topic level, so it's quite feasible to catch up on chats asynchronously. Basically Zulip brings the best things about mailing lists to chat. *: you can now turn off the topic requirement, in which case messages go into a "no topic" topic. But not using topics kind of defeats the purpose of using Zulip IMO.
DoItToMe81 5y ago
Zulip has many features that no Matrix client currently has.

eliudprom1 5y ago

noobermin 5y ago

Perhaps it's the "free tier" hosting (I don't have enough time or desire to figure out self-hosting) leaves a lot to be desired. Images are sometimes slow to load and the image upload from a phone is a little bit janky, especially compared to Slack. I primarily use it for a sort of photo sharing log with my fiance, and I convinced her to do it for "open source," so perhaps I'm not the intended audience.

awill 5y ago

Dropbox bought this and then open sourced it, right? Did they buy the company only for talent, and not the product? Why didn't Dropbox try to actually use it to compete with Slack? Teams is terrible, but integrated. Slack is better, but isolated from good video/storage. It does seem there's room for a third option.

rstarast 5y ago

I'd love to work somewhere that uses Zulip over Slack, for the product itself, but particularly because I believe it has a good chance of coming with a more mindful communication approach than your average Slack shop. Anyone hiring?

lanstein 5y ago
raises hand You’re spot on.

lastdong 5y ago

Congrats Zulip team! Amazing milestone, and hoping many more celebrations ahead

DreamFlasher 5y ago

It still doesn't have e2e encryption. It's unfortunate that they reinvented the wheel instead of using a great protocol (matrix) and focusing on writing a great client.

mrbabbage 5y ago
Zulip came out in 2012, which predates Matrix.
- klysm 5y ago
  Then they must’ve pre-invented it!
- 411111111111111 5y ago
  They obviously should've used a time machine.
dsr_ 5y ago
It generally doesn't need e2e encryption, because it's strictly public or strictly inside-the-firewall. If it had federation capabilities, or people wanted to use private groups, it would need e2e. I hope that's on their drawing board.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Right. As long as you are accessing the site over SSL and your server is secured, then you really have a form of e2e.
emptysongglass 5y ago
E2EE doesn't really work in large chatrooms on Matrix either. I don't know how many large groups you're in on Matrix but just as a most-recent example, the Garage folks just tombstoned their E2EE room for a public one because Matrix still isn't ready for large-format E2EE encrypted chats. Search history is painful and most often previous chats will show up as "waiting..." forever so there's zero context coming in.

tiffanyh 5y ago

For those who don't like the UI design, there's significant work happening to freshening it up. See the discussion (and mockups) below. https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/UI.20redesign https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/UI.20... Congrats to this team for the product they deliver and service they provide.

presentation 5y ago
That’s good to hear - always just seemed really clunky and therefore harder so we’ll my team on than pretty-looking slack.

dang 5y ago

Related: Zulip Cloud security vulnerability with reusable invitation links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30479430 - Feb 2022 (35 comments) Why Zulip will stand the test of time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595926 - Dec 2021 (80 comments) Why Zulip will not get on the blockchain bandwagon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29205346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29205346 - Nov 2021 (195 comments) Zulip 4.0: Threaded open source team chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149123 - May 2021 (170 comments) Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860338 - July 2020 (133 comments) Zulip 2.0: Open source team chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284321 - March 2019 (96 comments) Zulip Server 1.9: HipChat import and much more - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400988 - Nov 2018 (123 comments) Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622987 - July 2018 (99 comments) Slack channels are a waste of time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622707 - July 2018 (49 comments) Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16863675 - April 2018 (148 comments) Zulip Server 1.6 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14506426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14506426 - June 2017 (14 comments) Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961 - Sept 2015 (313 comments) Dropbox Acquires Zulip, A Stealthy Workplace Chat Solution Still In Private Beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7419408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7419408 - March 2014 (14 comments)

gnulinux 5y ago

Zulip is pretty excellent. It's been a communication booster for the company I'm working for. Unfortunately, after almost 4 years they switched to Slack and Slack imho is terrible. Zulip to Slack was like going from Python to C I still feel disoriented to this day.

DoItToMe81 5y ago

I love the concept of Zulip, but my experience with multiple setups, and even their official chat, is that it becomes incredibly choppy and laggy when scrolling through a bulk of messages. Has this been fixed?

tabbott 5y ago
Hi! Being able to scroll through messages quickly has been a core design goal for the Zulip web application from the beginning, and we're not aware of any significant regressions here, so I'd like to get to the bottom of it. I'd love it if you reported what you're experiencing in #frontend in chat.zulip.org. We'll want to collect a profile from your browser, so we can figure out why you're seeing choppy scrolling.
- DoItToMe81 5y ago
  I'm going to be busy for the next few days, but when I get the time I definitely will.

merdaverse 5y ago

Apart from being open source, which is great, I don't get the main selling point of this. How are topics any different from threads in Slack? It seems to me that if people stick to using threads in Slack (which they usually do in my experience) you would have the same experience no?

mikecoles 5y ago

Zulip is amazing. The only feature I miss is legitimate federation. Everything else it does is top shelf.

roamerz 5y ago

Been live with Zulip at work for just over a year now. Works great for our use model and love the fact that we are able to self host - which also helps greatly with our compliance requirements. The code is rock solid as far as server stability is concerned and are maybe 1 defect and 1 enhancement away from it being perfect. Nice work Team Zulip.