7 ms·

Zulip 7.0: Threaded open-source team chat

191 points by mikece 3y ago

ofrzeta 3y ago
I wanted to move the company chat from Rocket to Zulip but had some problems with the importer. I heard they improved it but haven't tried since.
- tabbott 3y ago
  We're very happy to help debug that sort of thing in the Zulip development community: https://zulip.com/development-community/ https://zulip.com/development-community/. Unfortunately, basically no modern team chat product provides satisfactory documentation of their data export format (E.g. Rocket.Chat is just a MongoDB database dump). I don't blame them -- all the data of your instance is a pretty complex thing to document, tends to change often, and doesn't get a ton of use to motivate investing hundreds of hours into writing and maintaining good documentation for it. But it does mean the quality of import tools is limited by how many people have run it and reported all the issues they ran into so that we can fix them. It is not uncommon for our data import tools to need to work around things that are essentially data corruption in the original database. Our Rocket.Chat import tool was indeed improved greatly in 6.0 last November thanks to a user with a very large and old Rocket.Chat instance submitting a very helpful pull request last Fall, so you may have better luck if you try again now.
seanieb 3y ago
Love Zulip. It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch.
- revskill 3y ago
  By reading this blog post, it's easy to understand why. No screenshots for new readers to actually see what's the UI look like, what's the UX look like, what's other feature look like VISUALLY. Why taking too much words ? Remember one golden rule in marketing: One picture worths 1000 words.
  - nxpnsv 3y ago
    true but look at their main page: https://zulip.com https://zulip.com it is pretty good at showing zulip
  - madars 3y ago
    Looks like blog is about the diff between 6.0 and 7.0; see https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/ for screenshots. BTW, threaded conversations (called "instances" in Zephyr https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/ https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/, which Zulip's model is inspired by) are infinitely better than anything Discord/Slack/IRC have to offer and greatly contribute to discussion culture: it is considered a faux pas to not switch an instance when conversation topic changes, so you can easily narrow in on the entirety of a conversation even if a number different conversations are happening at the same time.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      Discord added threads recently which are nice but somewhat a completely different thing. It's like saying "let you and I discuss this after the meeting". But it's useful in a place where there is no structure. If the admin lets them have a long life they sometimes provide a nice archive view of solved things and such. I find zulip superior in every way except audio and video - which if we are being really honest Zulip does not actually have.
  - dabber21 3y ago
    https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch. Zulip was acquired by Dropbox before it was publicly available, and then after a few years Dropbox spun it out into an independent OSS project. It's kind of unfortunate that Dropbox never really gave Zulip a chance, because that was just before Slack became successful. Zulip as a product is way better than Slack and could have either "won" or influenced Slack and competitors to adopt a better conversation model. Of course, nothing is stopping that from happening today, but by the time Zulip was refounded and regained momentum, several critical years had passed in between and Slack was much further ahead in market share. Having used Zulip, Slack is now literally painful to use, especially at scale.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    I haven't used zulip, especially at a workplace, but the thing that Slack does so much better than everything else I've tried, is search. How is Zulip for search for large orgs with millions of messages? Discord doesn't hold a candle to Slack. For context, I'm not talking just about the ease and speed of searches, but also about the support for basic filters, exact phrase searching (Discord doesn't have this) or bypassing fuzzy search (Discord always fuzzy searches on the individual words of your search words)
    - nh2 3y ago
      I wondered this too. Just tried it on https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org: So far, it seems it doesn't support exact phrase search: Searching for "what" with our without quotes produces no results. Slack finds the results. Searching for `"option"` in quotes also finds `options`, so I'm not sure if exact, non-fuzzy search is possible. https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages suggests that there is no support for exact-search or case-sensitive search.
      - pcthrowaway 3y ago
        Thanks for actually doing the research! Until some other team chat offers a good search, there's no way I'd consider anything besides Slack if it's up to me.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tiffanyh 3y ago
> "The biggest news for this release is that Zulip is midway through a major visual redesign. The redesign is intended to give the app a clean, modern look, while preserving and enhancing Zulip’s highly efficient interaction design" The design of Zulip is often talked about. They are making it a major focus to improve. You can see the redesign at the link below (no account needed). https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org
- aidenn0 3y ago
  ... I hate the redesign, which probably means everybody but me will love it. Maybe I'm just old, but "clean, modern look" always seems to translate to "harder to figure out how to interact with it" for me.
  - tiffanyh 3y ago
    Have you looked at the redesign. It wouldn’t characterize it as “clean, modern look” even though the blog calls it that. It’s say it’s much more accessible / clear.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      I'm balancing the fact that it's not as bad as I expected with the fact that it's only halfway done... Maybe I'm being overly cynical.
      - terpimost 3y ago
        Font size is going to be configurable. Right now people like me zoom in 125%, while some zoom out to 90%. This a clear sign that different users interested in different information density.
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      The density is such that I feel its insulting to lump it in with "clean, modern", certainly. Also, is it just me, or does it evoke some Google Wave UI vibes? I wish I didn't have to choose between Zulip's UI/UX and Matrix's federation, client availability and obvious bright future...
2023throwawayy 3y ago
Zulip is a fantastic product, and they provide free service for open source projects. With their (somewhat new) public server feature, the chat is available for browsing without needing an account first. I strongly urge any open source project using Discord or Slack as their chat, to give Zulip a real shot.
- stavros 3y ago
  Agreed, Zulip is by far the best chat experience I've had for when I need to get stuff done. The ease with which you can keep track of threads in it is amazing.
- pentagrama 3y ago
  The feature of browse without having an account is great, it will be great for WordPress who uses Slack. I remember reading some articles about WordPress in the site WP Tavern who mentioned some sources as "announced on the WordPress Slack", with Zulip everyone will be able to link those announcements.
- zilti 3y ago
  Or Matrix, which also has threads now.
wrycoder 3y ago
What is the difference between using Zulip threads for topic discussions vs. using Discourse, with its categories?
- pjerem 3y ago
  The big Zulip feature, IMO, is that you can easily reorganize topics afterwards. It’s not like in a forum where you create a topic and then get answers (although you can). It’s more like a chat conversation that you can group and label once you detect it have its own topic.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Yes; if you've ever wanted to go back in time and create a new thread for an e-mail topic, you will understand what I like so much about Zulip.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
majkinetor 3y ago
Very nice. We use Mattermost. Its great, but you really get lost in topics quickly and its hard to follow them. Especially with bots that you can't remove from conversation when you need it. We also had to mumbo jumbo LDAP support via GitLab which is suboptimal and there seems to be no way to remove users forever from it, only deactivate them. The threads here look very nice and entire thing reminds on forum/email conversation. With free LDAP and AIM support I am certainly going to take a deep look.
- mikecoles 3y ago
  I've used Zulip in the past. Very nice software. At the time (they still may), push notifications were supported for self-hosted servers. It was a joy to use the software.
- stavros 3y ago
  Zulip makes keeping track of threads a breeze, you can basically create a feed of only the topics you want to see (you mute others) and you zoom in to a single topic to read all of it, or zoom out to see it interleaved in the chronological timeline of all messages in the company. It's fantastic because you can never get lost.
andybak 3y ago
Recently spent over a day trialing and configuring Zulip to discover that opening the forum to the public doesn't mean it's indexed by search engines. If your community content isn't indexed then in many cases it might as well not exist. The open web is based on linking and indexing (Google's current search monopoly aside)
- tabbott 3y ago
  You can do search engine indexing via https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive; it defaults to archiving your public access streams. We will eventually support search engine indexing without the extra overhead of running a separate archive tool (likely as an organization-level settings checkbox, since not everyone who wants public access wants search engine indexing).
  - kyleee 3y ago
    That GitHub URL got malformed, there is a semicolon appended
  - CoolCold 3y ago
    you are probably from Zulip, and looks like I've found bug on your website go to say https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/login/ https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/login/ and scroll down to the footer. Footer links are relative and seems to not work for at least https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/plans/ https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/plans/ - sends to https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/accounts/login/?next=/plans/ https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/accounts/login/?next=/p...
    - tabbott 3y ago
      Thanks for the report! It's intentional that if you're logged in that you get to the plans page showing the current plan for your organization, but the redirect for the case where you're not logged should go to the root domain.
smallerfish 3y ago
Glad they are working on it. I've been using it recently on a couple of my projects and hugely prefer it to slack. The new user experience was a little rough on the previous version (somebody thought "stream events" was an acceptable default topic name, for example, which would show up under all of your channels) but for the most part once over the hump most people seem good with it.
ezst 3y ago
I'm glad that zulip exists, though I was only mildly impressed by its threading model. The complexity of dealing with threads doesn't magically disappears with it, instead of specific discussions being organized as one-off sub-channels or as unlabeled chains of cited/related messages like on other protocols, you end up with channels followed by their seemingly infinite list of short lived topics turned clutter after a while. That does help delineate threads compared to e.g. slack (which everyone agrees is the worst in this area) but it just feels (to me) like reading more channels (because the "main" one is no loger practical as a "common"/"neutral" place). I think I'm just old school and prefer the raw simplicity of things like IRC where there is no assumption of threading: you'd just go about quoting exactly what you want to respond to, which is just enough context to connect the dots. IMHO there's no silver bullet: all the alternatives have their pros and cons and there's universal value in simplicity.
cloogshicer 3y ago
Does anybody know a cheap way to self-host a Zulip instance with ~200 users? I've looked at cloud vm offerings but they all seem fairly steep for the Zulip hardware requirements (especially the RAM). https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/requirements.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/requiremen...
- mdaniel 3y ago
  I would guess that the ram requirement is because that presumes memcached, postgresql, and redis are all running co-resident with Zulip; if your setup can split those apart (because you have them sized independently, or because your "cloud" offers hosted versions of them) then I'd guess the Zulip container itself will likely get away with a lot less ram As always, my suspicion is that you'll get better help jumping into chat.zulip.org and describing your concerns
  - cloogshicer 3y ago
    Thank you!
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Contabo offers quite a lot of RAM for not too much money. I'd recommend putting effort into a good backup system (no fancy multi-AZ stuff that makes other server farms so expensive). The $8.50 tier comes with 8GB of RAM, which should be good enough to host 200 users based on the numbers in the setup guide. If not, the $14 plan should definitely cover you. Hetzner is also a popular source of cheap servers. You'll see similar prices there, though they're often a bit higher (but with more options). If you're a real cheapskate, you can try using Oracle's always-free tier. That'll get you 4 ARM cores with about 6GB of RAM each for a total of 24GB if you combine them into one machine. Downside of the free tier: the connection is capped at 50mbps which may become a problem for 200 people.
  - cloogshicer 3y ago
    Thank you!
sundarurfriend 3y ago
Lots of nice UI and UX improvements, great to see. I hope > we’ve started a prototype of a next-generation Zulip mobile app in Flutter means that the same will happen to the mobile app - it's badly in need of a UI reboot.
nailer 3y ago
Does anyone know what curves zulip uses for user keypairs? I’m wondering if it would be possible to import an existing ED25519 keypair and use it with zulip.

191 points by mikece 3y ago

I wanted to move the company chat from Rocket to Zulip but had some problems with the importer. I heard they improved it but haven't tried since.

tabbott 3y ago
We're very happy to help debug that sort of thing in the Zulip development community: https://zulip.com/development-community/ https://zulip.com/development-community/. Unfortunately, basically no modern team chat product provides satisfactory documentation of their data export format (E.g. Rocket.Chat is just a MongoDB database dump). I don't blame them -- all the data of your instance is a pretty complex thing to document, tends to change often, and doesn't get a ton of use to motivate investing hundreds of hours into writing and maintaining good documentation for it. But it does mean the quality of import tools is limited by how many people have run it and reported all the issues they ran into so that we can fix them. It is not uncommon for our data import tools to need to work around things that are essentially data corruption in the original database. Our Rocket.Chat import tool was indeed improved greatly in 6.0 last November thanks to a user with a very large and old Rocket.Chat instance submitting a very helpful pull request last Fall, so you may have better luck if you try again now.

seanieb 3y ago

Love Zulip. It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch.

revskill 3y ago
By reading this blog post, it's easy to understand why. No screenshots for new readers to actually see what's the UI look like, what's the UX look like, what's other feature look like VISUALLY. Why taking too much words ? Remember one golden rule in marketing: One picture worths 1000 words.
- nxpnsv 3y ago
  true but look at their main page: https://zulip.com https://zulip.com it is pretty good at showing zulip
- madars 3y ago
  Looks like blog is about the diff between 6.0 and 7.0; see https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/ for screenshots. BTW, threaded conversations (called "instances" in Zephyr https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/ https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/, which Zulip's model is inspired by) are infinitely better than anything Discord/Slack/IRC have to offer and greatly contribute to discussion culture: it is considered a faux pas to not switch an instance when conversation topic changes, so you can easily narrow in on the entirety of a conversation even if a number different conversations are happening at the same time.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    Discord added threads recently which are nice but somewhat a completely different thing. It's like saying "let you and I discuss this after the meeting". But it's useful in a place where there is no structure. If the admin lets them have a long life they sometimes provide a nice archive view of solved things and such. I find zulip superior in every way except audio and video - which if we are being really honest Zulip does not actually have.
- dabber21 3y ago
  https://chat.zulip.org/ https://chat.zulip.org/
chimeracoder 3y ago
> It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch. Zulip was acquired by Dropbox before it was publicly available, and then after a few years Dropbox spun it out into an independent OSS project. It's kind of unfortunate that Dropbox never really gave Zulip a chance, because that was just before Slack became successful. Zulip as a product is way better than Slack and could have either "won" or influenced Slack and competitors to adopt a better conversation model. Of course, nothing is stopping that from happening today, but by the time Zulip was refounded and regained momentum, several critical years had passed in between and Slack was much further ahead in market share. Having used Zulip, Slack is now literally painful to use, especially at scale.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  I haven't used zulip, especially at a workplace, but the thing that Slack does so much better than everything else I've tried, is search. How is Zulip for search for large orgs with millions of messages? Discord doesn't hold a candle to Slack. For context, I'm not talking just about the ease and speed of searches, but also about the support for basic filters, exact phrase searching (Discord doesn't have this) or bypassing fuzzy search (Discord always fuzzy searches on the individual words of your search words)
  - nh2 3y ago
    I wondered this too. Just tried it on https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org: So far, it seems it doesn't support exact phrase search: Searching for "what" with our without quotes produces no results. Slack finds the results. Searching for `"option"` in quotes also finds `options`, so I'm not sure if exact, non-fuzzy search is possible. https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages suggests that there is no support for exact-search or case-sensitive search.
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      Thanks for actually doing the research! Until some other team chat offers a good search, there's no way I'd consider anything besides Slack if it's up to me.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tiffanyh 3y ago

> "The biggest news for this release is that Zulip is midway through a major visual redesign. The redesign is intended to give the app a clean, modern look, while preserving and enhancing Zulip’s highly efficient interaction design" The design of Zulip is often talked about. They are making it a major focus to improve. You can see the redesign at the link below (no account needed). https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org

aidenn0 3y ago
... I hate the redesign, which probably means everybody but me will love it. Maybe I'm just old, but "clean, modern look" always seems to translate to "harder to figure out how to interact with it" for me.
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  Have you looked at the redesign. It wouldn’t characterize it as “clean, modern look” even though the blog calls it that. It’s say it’s much more accessible / clear.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    I'm balancing the fact that it's not as bad as I expected with the fact that it's only halfway done... Maybe I'm being overly cynical.
    - terpimost 3y ago
      Font size is going to be configurable. Right now people like me zoom in 125%, while some zoom out to 90%. This a clear sign that different users interested in different information density.
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    The density is such that I feel its insulting to lump it in with "clean, modern", certainly. Also, is it just me, or does it evoke some Google Wave UI vibes? I wish I didn't have to choose between Zulip's UI/UX and Matrix's federation, client availability and obvious bright future...

2023throwawayy 3y ago

Zulip is a fantastic product, and they provide free service for open source projects. With their (somewhat new) public server feature, the chat is available for browsing without needing an account first. I strongly urge any open source project using Discord or Slack as their chat, to give Zulip a real shot.

stavros 3y ago
Agreed, Zulip is by far the best chat experience I've had for when I need to get stuff done. The ease with which you can keep track of threads in it is amazing.
pentagrama 3y ago
The feature of browse without having an account is great, it will be great for WordPress who uses Slack. I remember reading some articles about WordPress in the site WP Tavern who mentioned some sources as "announced on the WordPress Slack", with Zulip everyone will be able to link those announcements.
zilti 3y ago
Or Matrix, which also has threads now.

wrycoder 3y ago

What is the difference between using Zulip threads for topic discussions vs. using Discourse, with its categories?

pjerem 3y ago
The big Zulip feature, IMO, is that you can easily reorganize topics afterwards. It’s not like in a forum where you create a topic and then get answers (although you can). It’s more like a chat conversation that you can group and label once you detect it have its own topic.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Yes; if you've ever wanted to go back in time and create a new thread for an e-mail topic, you will understand what I like so much about Zulip.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

majkinetor 3y ago

Very nice. We use Mattermost. Its great, but you really get lost in topics quickly and its hard to follow them. Especially with bots that you can't remove from conversation when you need it. We also had to mumbo jumbo LDAP support via GitLab which is suboptimal and there seems to be no way to remove users forever from it, only deactivate them. The threads here look very nice and entire thing reminds on forum/email conversation. With free LDAP and AIM support I am certainly going to take a deep look.

mikecoles 3y ago
I've used Zulip in the past. Very nice software. At the time (they still may), push notifications were supported for self-hosted servers. It was a joy to use the software.
stavros 3y ago
Zulip makes keeping track of threads a breeze, you can basically create a feed of only the topics you want to see (you mute others) and you zoom in to a single topic to read all of it, or zoom out to see it interleaved in the chronological timeline of all messages in the company. It's fantastic because you can never get lost.

andybak 3y ago

Recently spent over a day trialing and configuring Zulip to discover that opening the forum to the public doesn't mean it's indexed by search engines. If your community content isn't indexed then in many cases it might as well not exist. The open web is based on linking and indexing (Google's current search monopoly aside)

tabbott 3y ago
You can do search engine indexing via https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive; it defaults to archiving your public access streams. We will eventually support search engine indexing without the extra overhead of running a separate archive tool (likely as an organization-level settings checkbox, since not everyone who wants public access wants search engine indexing).
- kyleee 3y ago
  That GitHub URL got malformed, there is a semicolon appended
- CoolCold 3y ago
  you are probably from Zulip, and looks like I've found bug on your website go to say https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/login/ https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/login/ and scroll down to the footer. Footer links are relative and seems to not work for at least https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/plans/ https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/plans/ - sends to https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/accounts/login/?next=/plans/ https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/accounts/login/?next=/p...
  - tabbott 3y ago
    Thanks for the report! It's intentional that if you're logged in that you get to the plans page showing the current plan for your organization, but the redirect for the case where you're not logged should go to the root domain.

smallerfish 3y ago

Glad they are working on it. I've been using it recently on a couple of my projects and hugely prefer it to slack. The new user experience was a little rough on the previous version (somebody thought "stream events" was an acceptable default topic name, for example, which would show up under all of your channels) but for the most part once over the hump most people seem good with it.

ezst 3y ago

I'm glad that zulip exists, though I was only mildly impressed by its threading model. The complexity of dealing with threads doesn't magically disappears with it, instead of specific discussions being organized as one-off sub-channels or as unlabeled chains of cited/related messages like on other protocols, you end up with channels followed by their seemingly infinite list of short lived topics turned clutter after a while. That does help delineate threads compared to e.g. slack (which everyone agrees is the worst in this area) but it just feels (to me) like reading more channels (because the "main" one is no loger practical as a "common"/"neutral" place). I think I'm just old school and prefer the raw simplicity of things like IRC where there is no assumption of threading: you'd just go about quoting exactly what you want to respond to, which is just enough context to connect the dots. IMHO there's no silver bullet: all the alternatives have their pros and cons and there's universal value in simplicity.

cloogshicer 3y ago

Does anybody know a cheap way to self-host a Zulip instance with ~200 users? I've looked at cloud vm offerings but they all seem fairly steep for the Zulip hardware requirements (especially the RAM). https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/requirements.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/requiremen...

mdaniel 3y ago
I would guess that the ram requirement is because that presumes memcached, postgresql, and redis are all running co-resident with Zulip; if your setup can split those apart (because you have them sized independently, or because your "cloud" offers hosted versions of them) then I'd guess the Zulip container itself will likely get away with a lot less ram As always, my suspicion is that you'll get better help jumping into chat.zulip.org and describing your concerns
- cloogshicer 3y ago
  Thank you!
jeroenhd 3y ago
Contabo offers quite a lot of RAM for not too much money. I'd recommend putting effort into a good backup system (no fancy multi-AZ stuff that makes other server farms so expensive). The $8.50 tier comes with 8GB of RAM, which should be good enough to host 200 users based on the numbers in the setup guide. If not, the $14 plan should definitely cover you. Hetzner is also a popular source of cheap servers. You'll see similar prices there, though they're often a bit higher (but with more options). If you're a real cheapskate, you can try using Oracle's always-free tier. That'll get you 4 ARM cores with about 6GB of RAM each for a total of 24GB if you combine them into one machine. Downside of the free tier: the connection is capped at 50mbps which may become a problem for 200 people.
- cloogshicer 3y ago
  Thank you!

sundarurfriend 3y ago

Lots of nice UI and UX improvements, great to see. I hope > we’ve started a prototype of a next-generation Zulip mobile app in Flutter means that the same will happen to the mobile app - it's badly in need of a UI reboot.

nailer 3y ago

Does anyone know what curves zulip uses for user keypairs? I’m wondering if it would be possible to import an existing ED25519 keypair and use it with zulip.