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> 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,

> 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.
    - 112233 3y ago
      very nice workaround with zulip — it has official exporter (zulip-archive) that creates static html of all accessible streams (and with a trivial change all PMs too). Which makes reading/searching a local operation.
rocmcd 3y ago
I didn't know Zulip was acquired by Dropbox! Thanks for the info. It's interesting to imagine a timeline where Dropbox becomes a leading business/collaboration tool, similar to GSuite or MS Office. It seems like they had many of the right pieces, between storage, paper, zulip... If they had added email and calendar plus potentially their own presentation and spreadsheet tools they could be have been a contender instead of relegated to pretty just storage at this point.
- price 3y ago
  That was in fact Dropbox's plan circa 2013-2014. (I worked there 2014-2017.) In fact they had email too: Mailbox, a mobile mail client with some brilliant product ideas, which marked the start of the acquisitions spree that included Zulip as well as Hackpad (which became Paper) and many small others. It didn't work out. Some of the reasons are in this Casey Newton article: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailbox-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    That article claims that swiping to delete/archive messages debuted in Mailbox, but I recall doing that in 2009 with the Palm Pre's builtin mail app.
    - price 3y ago
      Interesting. My perception in 2014 was right in line with the way it's told in that 2015 article: that this was a new and clever UI twist, one that I hadn't seen before and that many people in the industry were copying after seeing it in Mailbox. That was as an engineer in San Francisco, talking with designers and product folks and people much more plugged in to industry gossip than me - so I think that means it truly had not previously existed in the mobile apps (really, the iPhone apps) that people here who were connected were paying attention to. It sounds like Palm had the feature years earlier. Maybe the Mailbox folks got the idea from there! In any case I think they did succeed in bringing the feature to a lot more users, by making it something that people in the industry widely knew about and copied.
zilti 3y ago
Well, the UI design - while it did recently get a bit better - is shit

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.
  - 112233 3y ago
    very nice workaround with zulip — it has official exporter (zulip-archive) that creates static html of all accessible streams (and with a trivial change all PMs too). Which makes reading/searching a local operation.

rocmcd 3y ago

I didn't know Zulip was acquired by Dropbox! Thanks for the info. It's interesting to imagine a timeline where Dropbox becomes a leading business/collaboration tool, similar to GSuite or MS Office. It seems like they had many of the right pieces, between storage, paper, zulip... If they had added email and calendar plus potentially their own presentation and spreadsheet tools they could be have been a contender instead of relegated to pretty just storage at this point.

price 3y ago
That was in fact Dropbox's plan circa 2013-2014. (I worked there 2014-2017.) In fact they had email too: Mailbox, a mobile mail client with some brilliant product ideas, which marked the start of the acquisitions spree that included Zulip as well as Hackpad (which became Paper) and many small others. It didn't work out. Some of the reasons are in this Casey Newton article: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailbox-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...
- aidenn0 3y ago
  That article claims that swiping to delete/archive messages debuted in Mailbox, but I recall doing that in 2009 with the Palm Pre's builtin mail app.
  - price 3y ago
    Interesting. My perception in 2014 was right in line with the way it's told in that 2015 article: that this was a new and clever UI twist, one that I hadn't seen before and that many people in the industry were copying after seeing it in Mailbox. That was as an engineer in San Francisco, talking with designers and product folks and people much more plugged in to industry gossip than me - so I think that means it truly had not previously existed in the mobile apps (really, the iPhone apps) that people here who were connected were paying attention to. It sounds like Palm had the feature years earlier. Maybe the Mailbox folks got the idea from there! In any case I think they did succeed in bringing the feature to a lot more users, by making it something that people in the industry widely knew about and copied.

zilti 3y ago

Well, the UI design - while it did recently get a bit better - is shit