8 ms·

Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

200 points by capableweb 4y ago

oxff 4y ago
It is so bad though.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- brink 4y ago
  I've never used it. What's wrong with it?
  - cocolos 4y ago
    UI is not great.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      First time I used it, it was a bit confusing, as I didn't really know what to expect. Is it email? Live chat? A forum? Turns out, it's a bit of both, and trying to use it as any single one of them, will probably make it harder to use. Basically, I treat it as a live chat where it's easier to participate in different topics at the same time, Slack on steroids where everything is a "Thread" basically.
      - distances 4y ago
        Sounds similar to Flowdock model? I greatly preferred that and was so disappointed when Slack finally rolled out their version of threading. It felt almost useless in comparison. Alas, Flowdock is dead now and I've learned to embrace Slack as the better remaining alternative over Teams or Google Chat.
    - drwoland 4y ago
      I think it's better than slacks sidebar threaded reply. It also has better code blocks, less irritating pop up magic and no bots nagging you to fill in credentials all the time.
    - Operyl 4y ago
      That’s what the grandparent comment said, what specifically do you find wrong with the UI? I for one really enjoy it and the keyboard shortcuts.
  - yonixw 4y ago
    I loved most of it, but (1) the search feature, specially for non English language, rely on postgres tokenized search which is worse than slack. (2) there is no "gallery view" for all files shared with a group or a person. (3) The mobile app had different render from the web.. and bad RTL render (4) slack bots compatibility sometimes miss the mark.. Other than that... It worked fine. I kinda liked it but slack is more robust for me (even if slow).
    - tabbott 4y ago
      On the search front, have you tried the PGroonga search backend? https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/full-text-search.html#multi-language-full-text-search https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/full-text-... (It's only available when self-hosting at present.)
- JoshMandel 4y ago
  Obviously subjective but since comments mention UI: I love the web/desktop UI. It's got great power user features including well designed keyboard shortcuts. https://zulip.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts https://zulip.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts for details (my favorite is "n" for "next topic", which I use every morning to catch up on conversations).
  - sundarurfriend 4y ago
    n for next topic, j and k to move up and down within a topic, + to add a thumbs up to the current post, : to add any other emoji, and t to get a list of Recent topics so you can decide which ones to catch up on first. All these make Zulip so pleasant and breezy to use.
    - stavros 4y ago
      Plus it's fast, Slack is a vat of molasses and I hate my life every time I have to use it.
- alx__ 4y ago
  Yeah the UI make me feel like it was designed by developers. Which is cool if you love a clunky utilitarian vibe. :)
- turtlebits 4y ago
  To me, the UI is unfriendly/confusing. Not sure if I'm just used to Slack, but it is very hard to use. Simple things like stream messages only being displayed halfway down the viewport with no scrollbar making it seem like there are no earlier messages.
tryauuum 4y ago
What's the current status of RocketChat? How hard is it to get push notifications on mobile? I know I can find answers in google but I want them from someone with hands-on experience
capableweb 4y ago
Something I didn't see before, is that a bunch of open source communities seems to starting to use Zulip now as well. I've only seen it in a "remote software company" context before. Here are some case studies from Zulip themselves about specific organizations, how they moved to Zulip and how they are using it: - https://zulip.com/case-studies/rust/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/rust/ - https://zulip.com/case-studies/asciidoctor/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/asciidoctor/ - https://zulip.com/case-studies/lean/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/lean/ I know a bunch of the Rust people hang around on HN, maybe they can fill out any details or tell more about how it's going so far with using Zulip :)
- ChrisSD 4y ago
  It does take a bit of getting used to. Zulip is kind of a cross between chat and a forum. However, once I did get used to it I think it's been great. Organizing chat into defined topics is super useful for following discussions you're interested in, filtering out those you aren't and for keeping conversations going across time zones. It's more discoverable than chat but not as rigid as an actual forum. I feel it works well once the learning curve has been surmounted.
  - tiffanyh 4y ago
    It's most akin to email list serv.
- tabbott 4y ago
  Zulip has long been popular with open source projects (https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ https://zulip.com/for/open-source/), as well as a bunch of other non-business use cases (teaching, research, conferences, etc.). One reason folks might feel like it's new is that we recently reworked the Zulip website to discuss these other use cases for which Zulip is popular. We have always had a practice of prioritizing feedback and feature requests from open source communities, because improving the productivity of the global open source community is an important part of our mission as an organization. One of the largest such investments has been the native public access option (no account required!) that we released earlier this month: https://blog.zulip.com/2022/05/05/public-access-option/ https://blog.zulip.com/2022/05/05/public-access-option/ (I lead the Zulip project)
wnolens 4y ago
Given the 'tour', it's slack with named threads (that can be pinned). I like that feature. But it seems a pretty small thing. What are the other things that stand out about it? other than being open source.
- Strom 4y ago
  As someone who has used Zulip for years, I consider the named threads to be the reason to use Zulip. When used properly, it makes following discussions actually possible without being drowned by other concurrent messages. I'd say Discord is superior in many other ways, but for me this one killer feature still makes me prefer Zulip for work.
  - dgacmu 4y ago
    Strongly agree. My small, fully remote startup uses it, and this is the big reason we switched away from slack. The name threads are simply terrific for making it a better way to manage communication.
- shakna 4y ago
  For one, Zulip is a year older than Slack. However, it is still has a ton of bridges and other integrations, and all the shiny things you'd expect from Slack.
- maccam94 4y ago
  The thread-first model is quite different from the free-for-all channel model in IRC/Slack. Imagine the chaos in your email inbox if messages didn't have subject lines or threads. Zulip makes it actually feasible to follow a chat conversation asynchronously, and it's much easier to manage how many notifications you get.
- stavros 4y ago
  It's not a small thing, it's a huge thing. The way the entire UI is structured around this one difference is great, and makes for a completely different (and much, much better) experience.
mherdeg 4y ago
What happened to Gale? That was the other IM system I saw that felt like it had the complexity and internal self-consistency of Zephyr and it feels like it just kind of fell of the face of the earth.
- tabbott 4y ago
  Howdy mherdeg! I don't think I've heard of Gale, nor can I find it now that you mention the name... Which I guess is consistent with your "fell off the face of the Earth" theory. If you or anyone else can find a link, I'd love to read about it :).
  - mherdeg 4y ago
    Here's a smidgen of context: https://web.archive.org/web/20020126184926/http://www.gale.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020126184926/http://www.gale.o... https://web.archive.org/web/20011221165350/http://gale.org/engage.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011221165350/http://gale.org/e... https://web.archive.org/web/20020214082814/http://gale.org/locations https://web.archive.org/web/20020214082814/http://gale.org/l... https://web.archive.org/web/20011127185333/http://fugu.gale.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20011127185333/http://fugu.gale.... I think it was popular in a Caltech crowd? I think a zephyrgram was a "puff"? I think there was a fairly sophisticated tiered location/tag hierarchy that is very very broadly related to topic/stream/reaction emoji. Some of the contributor have usernames that look very familiar (I think that's the same jtr whose username I've seen elsewhere, for example).
  - cjbprime 4y ago
    I used Gale for years (met my spouse there a long time ago!) -- I think you can think of it as a Zephyr clone (as the name implies.. but from Caltech), so it shares the same kind of auto-created sub-categories model, and has federation. There were a decent array of text, nurses, and GUI (Tk!) clients.
KronisLV 4y ago
The carousel on the main page is very easily understandable, which is great! The whole topics (sub-channels, basically) idea seems interesting as well, though personally the solution itself seems pretty similar to two other great pieces of software out there: - Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ (the Jitsi integration was especially nice) - Mattermost https://mattermost.com/ (really simple to setup) Both of those also seemed serviceable, decently familiar and usable. I guess even Nextcloud Talk could work if that suits your environment better https://nextcloud.com/talk/ https://nextcloud.com/talk/ though personally it felt a little more barebones in comparison. Has anyone extensively used any of them and can share what details/differences jumped out at them? Admittedly, i probably missed most of those myself and just saw them as similar, self-hostable chat solutions.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I haven't used Rocket.Chat, but I've used the other two: Threading feels bolted on in Mattermost, but is the primary feature of zulip. Think of Zulip as a realtime version of NNTP, and Mattermost as a more modern IRC with a "reply" feature. The "right" way to use Zulip and Mattermost is quite different, though each one can be easily used as an inferior version of the other.
  - itao 4y ago
    Disclaimer: PM at Mattermost We of course use our own product every day and when I first joined the company in 2019 I also found that threading felt "bolted on". Primarily because channels rendered everything in the same linear feed regardless if it was a message or comment so there wasn't much point in taking the time to first hit reply. However, Collapsed Reply Thread [0] has been a game changer for me and not only do I no longer feel that way about threading, my productivity would plunge without it. That feature has been in public beta since last summer [1] and will go into general availability in two weeks to officially become the "right" way to use Mattermost. Not to say that it's the same as Zulip, just sharing an updated perspective. [0] https://docs.mattermost.com/channels/organize-conversations.html https://docs.mattermost.com/channels/organize-conversations.... [1] https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-beta/ https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-beta/
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m00dy 4y ago
great marketing, but again I can't see anything related to privacy.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  It's very easy to self-host. The only real gotcha are mobile notifications, because those are sent through centralized servers not hosted by you (because of how mobile APIs work). You have to choose server-wide between sending none (very private), sending redacted notifications (somewhat private, somewhat useful) or sending the full message in the notification (they see all your messages, but very convenient). Or I guess you can modify the mobile client and set up your own push notifications.
  - tabbott 4y ago
    https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/mobile-push-notifications.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/mobile-pus... has some more detail around mobile notifications. Our plan is to add end-to-end encryption for mobile push notifications, and we've got a design, but limited progress on implementation. One can follow the issue here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954.
    - stavros 4y ago
      The clients already use some secret for authenticating to the server, no? Can you not use the same secret for encryption? Or are you using tokens that need refreshing?
      - tabbott 4y ago
        The issue here is more complicated. A self-hosted Zulip server needs to send a push notification that reaches the Zulip mobile app on someone's device. For security model reasons, those push notifications need to be sent to Google/Apple via a server operating by Zulip itself. So your local Zulip server needs to share a secret with the Zulip mobile app on your device, and then it can encrypt the push notification's content so that only the destination mobile app can read it (and the intermediaries cannot). It's a basic cryptography problem at a high level, but there's subtle details around what metadata can be safely encrypted (the client does need to know which Zulip server's secret key to use!), backwards-compatibility, library choice, etc., that make it not trivial, which is why we haven't managed to implement this yet.
samatman 4y ago
I hope at some point to see a federated implementation of the Zulip communication model over Matrix. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/356 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/356 I'm at a point of choice fatigue with communication platforms where Zulip being siloed is more important than it being open source. I'm phasing out proprietary platforms in a way that will take years and may never complete. I don't want more apps, I don't want another user account, and I certainly don't want a bunch of user accounts on different servers.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Federation would make me almost instantly recommend it for a handful of cases, but in the meantime they have a lot of catching up to do in the privacy department. Behold, the two five year old tickets requesting that they stop passing notification text to Apple/Google cloud messaging: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/1190 https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/1190 For those who don't know: if you have an app and want to send a notification to a user, you use Apple or Google push notification services. In both cases, the notification is plaintext but transmitted via encrypted channel to Apple or Google, then transmitted via encrypted channel to the user's phone. But in each case, the push messaging provider gets to see the messaging text. So companies that give a shit about your privacy send a token instead, that says "hey, wake up, something happened, fetch a notification." Apple likely doesn't do anything with the notification text, but it's a given Google datamines the hell out of it. They also still don't have any form of e2ee. Here's another five year old ticket requesting end to end encrypted chat, where a bunch of people say "here's a long list of apps that support e2ee" and Zulip devs go "gosh golly how do they handle keys? Math is hard." https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096
  - stavros 4y ago
    This is extremely disingenuous. There are tons of usability issues when you have E2EE, to the point where you'd basically have to redesign Zulip and it wouldn't work the same way (e.g. how do you add a colleague to a chat channel and have them see old messages that they don't have keys for?). I'm going to assume good faith in your comment, but I'm really having a hard time doing it, and I'm one of the people who worked for SilentCircle! Another one of those people currently works for Zulip (hey Austin!). TL;DR: It would take a ton of effort and would basically require a pivot of the business model. Yet you present it as if it's some afterthought that can be tacked on, completely ignoring the fact that all none of their competitors (Slack, Teams, etc) support E2EE.
thallavajhula 4y ago
Why does this seem like a chat version of Kafka?
bachmeier 4y ago
Big fan of Zulip. Only problem is that you don't get email notifications unless you're directly @ mentioned in a response, even if you're participating in a discussion, and even if they're replying directly to you. Otherwise I find the threading approach to be a big win.
- vitro 4y ago
  You can set up Alert words in your personal settings and when that word appears in the chat, you will get notified as well.
  - bachmeier 4y ago
    I haven't had much luck with that. Here's an example of where you run into problems: "You can do that by changing your code like this: [code] Let me know when you have the results." "Okay, but I'm going to be busy for the next few days. Will post here when it's done." {Three days later}: "Your suggestion worked! Let me know how to proceed from here." You can either keep Zulip open all the time - which makes me cringe - or you can go without any form of notification. Then a week later you decide to check back and see the message, but they forgot to @ you.
- philip1209 4y ago
  When I was building MoonlightWork.com, we had ~3x the DAUs on Email that we did on our website. So, I strongly believe that good email summaries are key to async comms. I'm working on a similar threaded messages project called Booklet (https://booklet.community https://booklet.community), and I think good email summaries are the key to the product. It's hard to do, but there are some cool data opportunities to improve relevancy.
- tabbott 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We're planning to extend our notifications system model to let you specify a configurable policy for which topics one wants notifications for. In particular, a lot of preparatory refactoring towards supporting this has been merged over the last year, and we have a contributor planning to focus on this project over the summer. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12309 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12309 is probably the right issue to follow for now. My plan for today included writing a much more technical version of that issue with a specific implementation plan, before someone submitted Zulip to Hacker News :).
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tasubotadas 4y ago
How are the video call options on Zulip? Is it possible to easily jump on a call with somebody and share your screen?
- tabbott 4y ago
  Zulip doesn't do video calls itself, but we have handy "Start a call" button and you can configure which video call provider that uses. See: https://zulip.com/help/start-a-call https://zulip.com/help/start-a-call All of our supported providers support screensharing. Our philosophy on this is that having a nice integration with multiple dedicated video call providers is almost certainly going to be a better user experience than building our own video call stack.
jupp0r 4y ago
It boggles my mind why not more of these Slack clones implement threaded conversations. It’s such a popular feature and not hard to implement. It could be introduced in a backwards compatible way in order to not break existing clients.
- stavros 4y ago
  Which Slack clones are you talking about? This comment seems off-topic here, given that threaded conversations are the ONLY thing Zulip implements (way before Slack), making Slack a bad Zulip clone.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    Matrix
    - viccuad 4y ago
      Matrix has threads.
- FractalHQ 4y ago
  Discord added threads this year and it’s lovely.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    I really like discord's spin on then where threads are actually visible for some limited time. You don't have to hunt for the right message in the channel like in Slack - if a thread was started in the last few days, it's on the list.
tkiolp4 4y ago
What’s the difference between a Zulip topic and a Slack channel? Certainly, having one big #engineering Slack channel is unproductive (hundreds of people interacting)… but who’s stopping you from creating #engineering-utc-9 for the people who require it? Put it in another way, what prevents us from using Zulip topics the “wrong way”?
- usr1106 4y ago
  What would be the purpose of #engineering-utc-9? Normally disussions go around some topic and those who are interested or have a contribution don't necessarily work in the same time zone. Yor suggestion would only be relevant if a problem needs to solved now or never. Or for a completely useless chitchat channel that people follow only realtime but nobody would ever read and reply to afterwards.
- usr1106 4y ago
  We use zulip at work (yes, heavy geek influence:) ). Nothing except social pressure prevents people from misusing topics. It happens to all of us, when a different thread gets spawned during a discussion. Sometimes when someone does not know where a question or bug would belong to. But you can move the messages in question to a suitable topic (existing or new) at any time. That used to be a bit buggy in the past, but has been working smoothly for a couple of releases. Within the same zulip stream everyone can do it (in theory causing edit wars, but it has never happened in our company). To move it to a different stream, you need to be admin. That's sometimes a bit weird, but our admin is quick to do it when discussions went offtopic. Edit: I can't answer why it was worse in Slack. Luckily I haven't had to use Slack for 4 years. I only remember that it was much worse. Wasn't it so in Slack the user replying explicitly needed to select a threaded reply (and few did so). And even if they had done so, the one coming to work 8 or 24 hours later needed to look through everything (or nothing) because the (possibly threaded) messages had no topic?
dang 4y ago
Related: Zulip 5.0: Threaded open-source team chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846659 - March 2022 (86 comments) 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) 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) 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)
sdevonoes 4y ago
Maybe I'm missing the point, but based on their example, what would be the difference between the Slack channel #annual-summit-tuesday-night-catering and the Zulip topic #annual-summit - tuesday night catering? I get the point of having topics (less people involved. Kinda like subreddits)... but in Slack I create channels targeted for very specific topics (like the #annual-summit-tuesday-night-catering one) and they work just fine.
- letmeinhere 4y ago
  Yeah, I think the key distinctions are: - the "topics" are grouped under "streams" that are defined at the organization level. Slack lets every individual set up star groups for channels, but in practice channels are an unorganized mess for all. And, because they have that container, topics are just zero-friction to define. - Streams, not topics, have membership and permissions. I like this because it means that streams can be defined as an _audience_ for a number of topics. Whether that topic is relevant to you at the moment is a different question, but I often want to be able to skim all of my (e.g.) `team-galactus` topics quickly before moving on to stuff about `greater-denver` or whatever. I also don't want to have to invite people to (or exhaustively document) all of the various topics that they might have a connection to.
- maccam94 4y ago
  Streams are opt-in. Topics are transient and fast to create, and everyone in the stream will automatically see the new topic. You also get per-topic read position tracking, and stream members can mute individual topics if they want. You can also view the entire stream at once (or even all streams!) with the topics interleaved. The sidebar shows the most recent topics in each stream, so inactive topics are eventually hidden from the main UI (though you can still dig them up if you go looking for them).
wscott 4y ago
Zulip is great. One thing that I don't see mentioned that is a huge deal that you don't realize at first. The topic for a message can be changed after the fact and by anyone. So you are having a big discussion and at some point it veers off into some interesting tangent (or pointless flamewar). The original person didn't know it that idea was unique and had interest, but afterwards a big chunk of topic_A was actually about topic_B. So later a helpful person will go back and change the topic of the message that started it and all the replies will also move to that new topic name. This means that someone in another time zone or who was busy during the original conversation can come back later and see the ideas discussed and focus on just one ones that are interesting without having to read huge discussion threads. And the threads can be on-topic because people can prune it after-the-fact. Yes, this does mean you need to be a "team" and trust each other to make reasonable edits to the chat history. Just like a wiki, it sounds like a crazy idea, but works great in practice.
- baytowner 4y ago
  Reminds me of thread moderation in forums - merging threads and such to keep similar topics together when they spilled over. I really liked the carousel demo and how they tried to differentiate, would be a good challenge to explain what you wrote in a single panel.

200 points by capableweb 4y ago

oxff 4y ago

It is so bad though.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brink 4y ago
I've never used it. What's wrong with it?
- cocolos 4y ago
  UI is not great.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    First time I used it, it was a bit confusing, as I didn't really know what to expect. Is it email? Live chat? A forum? Turns out, it's a bit of both, and trying to use it as any single one of them, will probably make it harder to use. Basically, I treat it as a live chat where it's easier to participate in different topics at the same time, Slack on steroids where everything is a "Thread" basically.
    - distances 4y ago
      Sounds similar to Flowdock model? I greatly preferred that and was so disappointed when Slack finally rolled out their version of threading. It felt almost useless in comparison. Alas, Flowdock is dead now and I've learned to embrace Slack as the better remaining alternative over Teams or Google Chat.
  - drwoland 4y ago
    I think it's better than slacks sidebar threaded reply. It also has better code blocks, less irritating pop up magic and no bots nagging you to fill in credentials all the time.
  - Operyl 4y ago
    That’s what the grandparent comment said, what specifically do you find wrong with the UI? I for one really enjoy it and the keyboard shortcuts.
- yonixw 4y ago
  I loved most of it, but (1) the search feature, specially for non English language, rely on postgres tokenized search which is worse than slack. (2) there is no "gallery view" for all files shared with a group or a person. (3) The mobile app had different render from the web.. and bad RTL render (4) slack bots compatibility sometimes miss the mark.. Other than that... It worked fine. I kinda liked it but slack is more robust for me (even if slow).
  - tabbott 4y ago
    On the search front, have you tried the PGroonga search backend? https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/full-text-search.html#multi-language-full-text-search https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/full-text-... (It's only available when self-hosting at present.)
JoshMandel 4y ago
Obviously subjective but since comments mention UI: I love the web/desktop UI. It's got great power user features including well designed keyboard shortcuts. https://zulip.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts https://zulip.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts for details (my favorite is "n" for "next topic", which I use every morning to catch up on conversations).
- sundarurfriend 4y ago
  n for next topic, j and k to move up and down within a topic, + to add a thumbs up to the current post, : to add any other emoji, and t to get a list of Recent topics so you can decide which ones to catch up on first. All these make Zulip so pleasant and breezy to use.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Plus it's fast, Slack is a vat of molasses and I hate my life every time I have to use it.
alx__ 4y ago
Yeah the UI make me feel like it was designed by developers. Which is cool if you love a clunky utilitarian vibe. :)
turtlebits 4y ago
To me, the UI is unfriendly/confusing. Not sure if I'm just used to Slack, but it is very hard to use. Simple things like stream messages only being displayed halfway down the viewport with no scrollbar making it seem like there are no earlier messages.

tryauuum 4y ago

What's the current status of RocketChat? How hard is it to get push notifications on mobile? I know I can find answers in google but I want them from someone with hands-on experience

capableweb 4y ago

Something I didn't see before, is that a bunch of open source communities seems to starting to use Zulip now as well. I've only seen it in a "remote software company" context before. Here are some case studies from Zulip themselves about specific organizations, how they moved to Zulip and how they are using it: - https://zulip.com/case-studies/rust/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/rust/ - https://zulip.com/case-studies/asciidoctor/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/asciidoctor/ - https://zulip.com/case-studies/lean/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/lean/ I know a bunch of the Rust people hang around on HN, maybe they can fill out any details or tell more about how it's going so far with using Zulip :)

ChrisSD 4y ago
It does take a bit of getting used to. Zulip is kind of a cross between chat and a forum. However, once I did get used to it I think it's been great. Organizing chat into defined topics is super useful for following discussions you're interested in, filtering out those you aren't and for keeping conversations going across time zones. It's more discoverable than chat but not as rigid as an actual forum. I feel it works well once the learning curve has been surmounted.
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  It's most akin to email list serv.
tabbott 4y ago
Zulip has long been popular with open source projects (https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ https://zulip.com/for/open-source/), as well as a bunch of other non-business use cases (teaching, research, conferences, etc.). One reason folks might feel like it's new is that we recently reworked the Zulip website to discuss these other use cases for which Zulip is popular. We have always had a practice of prioritizing feedback and feature requests from open source communities, because improving the productivity of the global open source community is an important part of our mission as an organization. One of the largest such investments has been the native public access option (no account required!) that we released earlier this month: https://blog.zulip.com/2022/05/05/public-access-option/ https://blog.zulip.com/2022/05/05/public-access-option/ (I lead the Zulip project)

wnolens 4y ago

Given the 'tour', it's slack with named threads (that can be pinned). I like that feature. But it seems a pretty small thing. What are the other things that stand out about it? other than being open source.

Strom 4y ago
As someone who has used Zulip for years, I consider the named threads to be the reason to use Zulip. When used properly, it makes following discussions actually possible without being drowned by other concurrent messages. I'd say Discord is superior in many other ways, but for me this one killer feature still makes me prefer Zulip for work.
- dgacmu 4y ago
  Strongly agree. My small, fully remote startup uses it, and this is the big reason we switched away from slack. The name threads are simply terrific for making it a better way to manage communication.
shakna 4y ago
For one, Zulip is a year older than Slack. However, it is still has a ton of bridges and other integrations, and all the shiny things you'd expect from Slack.
maccam94 4y ago
The thread-first model is quite different from the free-for-all channel model in IRC/Slack. Imagine the chaos in your email inbox if messages didn't have subject lines or threads. Zulip makes it actually feasible to follow a chat conversation asynchronously, and it's much easier to manage how many notifications you get.
stavros 4y ago
It's not a small thing, it's a huge thing. The way the entire UI is structured around this one difference is great, and makes for a completely different (and much, much better) experience.

mherdeg 4y ago

What happened to Gale? That was the other IM system I saw that felt like it had the complexity and internal self-consistency of Zephyr and it feels like it just kind of fell of the face of the earth.

tabbott 4y ago
Howdy mherdeg! I don't think I've heard of Gale, nor can I find it now that you mention the name... Which I guess is consistent with your "fell off the face of the Earth" theory. If you or anyone else can find a link, I'd love to read about it :).
- mherdeg 4y ago
  Here's a smidgen of context: https://web.archive.org/web/20020126184926/http://www.gale.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020126184926/http://www.gale.o... https://web.archive.org/web/20011221165350/http://gale.org/engage.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011221165350/http://gale.org/e... https://web.archive.org/web/20020214082814/http://gale.org/locations https://web.archive.org/web/20020214082814/http://gale.org/l... https://web.archive.org/web/20011127185333/http://fugu.gale.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20011127185333/http://fugu.gale.... I think it was popular in a Caltech crowd? I think a zephyrgram was a "puff"? I think there was a fairly sophisticated tiered location/tag hierarchy that is very very broadly related to topic/stream/reaction emoji. Some of the contributor have usernames that look very familiar (I think that's the same jtr whose username I've seen elsewhere, for example).
- cjbprime 4y ago
  I used Gale for years (met my spouse there a long time ago!) -- I think you can think of it as a Zephyr clone (as the name implies.. but from Caltech), so it shares the same kind of auto-created sub-categories model, and has federation. There were a decent array of text, nurses, and GUI (Tk!) clients.

KronisLV 4y ago

The carousel on the main page is very easily understandable, which is great! The whole topics (sub-channels, basically) idea seems interesting as well, though personally the solution itself seems pretty similar to two other great pieces of software out there: - Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ (the Jitsi integration was especially nice) - Mattermost https://mattermost.com/ (really simple to setup) Both of those also seemed serviceable, decently familiar and usable. I guess even Nextcloud Talk could work if that suits your environment better https://nextcloud.com/talk/ https://nextcloud.com/talk/ though personally it felt a little more barebones in comparison. Has anyone extensively used any of them and can share what details/differences jumped out at them? Admittedly, i probably missed most of those myself and just saw them as similar, self-hostable chat solutions.

aidenn0 4y ago
I haven't used Rocket.Chat, but I've used the other two: Threading feels bolted on in Mattermost, but is the primary feature of zulip. Think of Zulip as a realtime version of NNTP, and Mattermost as a more modern IRC with a "reply" feature. The "right" way to use Zulip and Mattermost is quite different, though each one can be easily used as an inferior version of the other.
- itao 4y ago
  Disclaimer: PM at Mattermost We of course use our own product every day and when I first joined the company in 2019 I also found that threading felt "bolted on". Primarily because channels rendered everything in the same linear feed regardless if it was a message or comment so there wasn't much point in taking the time to first hit reply. However, Collapsed Reply Thread [0] has been a game changer for me and not only do I no longer feel that way about threading, my productivity would plunge without it. That feature has been in public beta since last summer [1] and will go into general availability in two weeks to officially become the "right" way to use Mattermost. Not to say that it's the same as Zulip, just sharing an updated perspective. [0] https://docs.mattermost.com/channels/organize-conversations.html https://docs.mattermost.com/channels/organize-conversations.... [1] https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-beta/ https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-beta/

deleted 4y ago

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m00dy 4y ago

great marketing, but again I can't see anything related to privacy.

wongarsu 4y ago
It's very easy to self-host. The only real gotcha are mobile notifications, because those are sent through centralized servers not hosted by you (because of how mobile APIs work). You have to choose server-wide between sending none (very private), sending redacted notifications (somewhat private, somewhat useful) or sending the full message in the notification (they see all your messages, but very convenient). Or I guess you can modify the mobile client and set up your own push notifications.
- tabbott 4y ago
  https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/mobile-push-notifications.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/mobile-pus... has some more detail around mobile notifications. Our plan is to add end-to-end encryption for mobile push notifications, and we've got a design, but limited progress on implementation. One can follow the issue here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954.
  - stavros 4y ago
    The clients already use some secret for authenticating to the server, no? Can you not use the same secret for encryption? Or are you using tokens that need refreshing?
    - tabbott 4y ago
      The issue here is more complicated. A self-hosted Zulip server needs to send a push notification that reaches the Zulip mobile app on someone's device. For security model reasons, those push notifications need to be sent to Google/Apple via a server operating by Zulip itself. So your local Zulip server needs to share a secret with the Zulip mobile app on your device, and then it can encrypt the push notification's content so that only the destination mobile app can read it (and the intermediaries cannot). It's a basic cryptography problem at a high level, but there's subtle details around what metadata can be safely encrypted (the client does need to know which Zulip server's secret key to use!), backwards-compatibility, library choice, etc., that make it not trivial, which is why we haven't managed to implement this yet.

samatman 4y ago

I hope at some point to see a federated implementation of the Zulip communication model over Matrix. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/356 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/356 I'm at a point of choice fatigue with communication platforms where Zulip being siloed is more important than it being open source. I'm phasing out proprietary platforms in a way that will take years and may never complete. I don't want more apps, I don't want another user account, and I certainly don't want a bunch of user accounts on different servers.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Federation would make me almost instantly recommend it for a handful of cases, but in the meantime they have a lot of catching up to do in the privacy department. Behold, the two five year old tickets requesting that they stop passing notification text to Apple/Google cloud messaging: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/1190 https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/1190 For those who don't know: if you have an app and want to send a notification to a user, you use Apple or Google push notification services. In both cases, the notification is plaintext but transmitted via encrypted channel to Apple or Google, then transmitted via encrypted channel to the user's phone. But in each case, the push messaging provider gets to see the messaging text. So companies that give a shit about your privacy send a token instead, that says "hey, wake up, something happened, fetch a notification." Apple likely doesn't do anything with the notification text, but it's a given Google datamines the hell out of it. They also still don't have any form of e2ee. Here's another five year old ticket requesting end to end encrypted chat, where a bunch of people say "here's a long list of apps that support e2ee" and Zulip devs go "gosh golly how do they handle keys? Math is hard." https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6096
- stavros 4y ago
  This is extremely disingenuous. There are tons of usability issues when you have E2EE, to the point where you'd basically have to redesign Zulip and it wouldn't work the same way (e.g. how do you add a colleague to a chat channel and have them see old messages that they don't have keys for?). I'm going to assume good faith in your comment, but I'm really having a hard time doing it, and I'm one of the people who worked for SilentCircle! Another one of those people currently works for Zulip (hey Austin!). TL;DR: It would take a ton of effort and would basically require a pivot of the business model. Yet you present it as if it's some afterthought that can be tacked on, completely ignoring the fact that all none of their competitors (Slack, Teams, etc) support E2EE.

thallavajhula 4y ago

Why does this seem like a chat version of Kafka?

bachmeier 4y ago

Big fan of Zulip. Only problem is that you don't get email notifications unless you're directly @ mentioned in a response, even if you're participating in a discussion, and even if they're replying directly to you. Otherwise I find the threading approach to be a big win.

vitro 4y ago
You can set up Alert words in your personal settings and when that word appears in the chat, you will get notified as well.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  I haven't had much luck with that. Here's an example of where you run into problems: "You can do that by changing your code like this: [code] Let me know when you have the results." "Okay, but I'm going to be busy for the next few days. Will post here when it's done." {Three days later}: "Your suggestion worked! Let me know how to proceed from here." You can either keep Zulip open all the time - which makes me cringe - or you can go without any form of notification. Then a week later you decide to check back and see the message, but they forgot to @ you.
philip1209 4y ago
When I was building MoonlightWork.com, we had ~3x the DAUs on Email that we did on our website. So, I strongly believe that good email summaries are key to async comms. I'm working on a similar threaded messages project called Booklet (https://booklet.community https://booklet.community), and I think good email summaries are the key to the product. It's hard to do, but there are some cool data opportunities to improve relevancy.
tabbott 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We're planning to extend our notifications system model to let you specify a configurable policy for which topics one wants notifications for. In particular, a lot of preparatory refactoring towards supporting this has been merged over the last year, and we have a contributor planning to focus on this project over the summer. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12309 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12309 is probably the right issue to follow for now. My plan for today included writing a much more technical version of that issue with a specific implementation plan, before someone submitted Zulip to Hacker News :).

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tasubotadas 4y ago

How are the video call options on Zulip? Is it possible to easily jump on a call with somebody and share your screen?

tabbott 4y ago
Zulip doesn't do video calls itself, but we have handy "Start a call" button and you can configure which video call provider that uses. See: https://zulip.com/help/start-a-call https://zulip.com/help/start-a-call All of our supported providers support screensharing. Our philosophy on this is that having a nice integration with multiple dedicated video call providers is almost certainly going to be a better user experience than building our own video call stack.

jupp0r 4y ago

It boggles my mind why not more of these Slack clones implement threaded conversations. It’s such a popular feature and not hard to implement. It could be introduced in a backwards compatible way in order to not break existing clients.

stavros 4y ago
Which Slack clones are you talking about? This comment seems off-topic here, given that threaded conversations are the ONLY thing Zulip implements (way before Slack), making Slack a bad Zulip clone.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Matrix
  - viccuad 4y ago
    Matrix has threads.
FractalHQ 4y ago
Discord added threads this year and it’s lovely.
- viraptor 4y ago
  I really like discord's spin on then where threads are actually visible for some limited time. You don't have to hunt for the right message in the channel like in Slack - if a thread was started in the last few days, it's on the list.

tkiolp4 4y ago

What’s the difference between a Zulip topic and a Slack channel? Certainly, having one big #engineering Slack channel is unproductive (hundreds of people interacting)… but who’s stopping you from creating #engineering-utc-9 for the people who require it? Put it in another way, what prevents us from using Zulip topics the “wrong way”?

usr1106 4y ago
What would be the purpose of #engineering-utc-9? Normally disussions go around some topic and those who are interested or have a contribution don't necessarily work in the same time zone. Yor suggestion would only be relevant if a problem needs to solved now or never. Or for a completely useless chitchat channel that people follow only realtime but nobody would ever read and reply to afterwards.
usr1106 4y ago
We use zulip at work (yes, heavy geek influence:) ). Nothing except social pressure prevents people from misusing topics. It happens to all of us, when a different thread gets spawned during a discussion. Sometimes when someone does not know where a question or bug would belong to. But you can move the messages in question to a suitable topic (existing or new) at any time. That used to be a bit buggy in the past, but has been working smoothly for a couple of releases. Within the same zulip stream everyone can do it (in theory causing edit wars, but it has never happened in our company). To move it to a different stream, you need to be admin. That's sometimes a bit weird, but our admin is quick to do it when discussions went offtopic. Edit: I can't answer why it was worse in Slack. Luckily I haven't had to use Slack for 4 years. I only remember that it was much worse. Wasn't it so in Slack the user replying explicitly needed to select a threaded reply (and few did so). And even if they had done so, the one coming to work 8 or 24 hours later needed to look through everything (or nothing) because the (possibly threaded) messages had no topic?

dang 4y ago

Related: Zulip 5.0: Threaded open-source team chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846659 - March 2022 (86 comments) 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) 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) 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)

sdevonoes 4y ago

Maybe I'm missing the point, but based on their example, what would be the difference between the Slack channel #annual-summit-tuesday-night-catering and the Zulip topic #annual-summit - tuesday night catering? I get the point of having topics (less people involved. Kinda like subreddits)... but in Slack I create channels targeted for very specific topics (like the #annual-summit-tuesday-night-catering one) and they work just fine.

letmeinhere 4y ago
Yeah, I think the key distinctions are: - the "topics" are grouped under "streams" that are defined at the organization level. Slack lets every individual set up star groups for channels, but in practice channels are an unorganized mess for all. And, because they have that container, topics are just zero-friction to define. - Streams, not topics, have membership and permissions. I like this because it means that streams can be defined as an _audience_ for a number of topics. Whether that topic is relevant to you at the moment is a different question, but I often want to be able to skim all of my (e.g.) `team-galactus` topics quickly before moving on to stuff about `greater-denver` or whatever. I also don't want to have to invite people to (or exhaustively document) all of the various topics that they might have a connection to.
maccam94 4y ago
Streams are opt-in. Topics are transient and fast to create, and everyone in the stream will automatically see the new topic. You also get per-topic read position tracking, and stream members can mute individual topics if they want. You can also view the entire stream at once (or even all streams!) with the topics interleaved. The sidebar shows the most recent topics in each stream, so inactive topics are eventually hidden from the main UI (though you can still dig them up if you go looking for them).

wscott 4y ago

Zulip is great. One thing that I don't see mentioned that is a huge deal that you don't realize at first. The topic for a message can be changed after the fact and by anyone. So you are having a big discussion and at some point it veers off into some interesting tangent (or pointless flamewar). The original person didn't know it that idea was unique and had interest, but afterwards a big chunk of topic_A was actually about topic_B. So later a helpful person will go back and change the topic of the message that started it and all the replies will also move to that new topic name. This means that someone in another time zone or who was busy during the original conversation can come back later and see the ideas discussed and focus on just one ones that are interesting without having to read huge discussion threads. And the threads can be on-topic because people can prune it after-the-fact. Yes, this does mean you need to be a "team" and trust each other to make reasonable edits to the chat history. Just like a wiki, it sounds like a crazy idea, but works great in practice.

baytowner 4y ago
Reminds me of thread moderation in forums - merging threads and such to keep similar topics together when they spilled over. I really liked the carousel demo and how they tried to differentiate, would be a good challenge to explain what you wrote in a single panel.