5 ms·

Zulip 9.0: Organized chat for distributed teams

139 points by Tomte 2y ago

FriedPickles 2y ago
The acquisition Dropbox failed to kill.
Tomte 2y ago
> To better match terminology familiar from other apps, “streams” have been renamed to “channels” across the app in this release. Thank God! Hard to believe that it took until 9.0, but they made the right call.
clumsysmurf 2y ago
> We’ve been hard at work on Zulip’s next-generation mobile app for Android and iOS, built with Flutter. Interesting choice to choose Flutter ... will be interesting to see if that was the right choice in the long term. I get the impression Google has more people working on Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform.
- the_duke 2y ago
  Quite a lot of Flutter apps have popped up over the last few years. It's definitely gaining adoption.
  - creshal 2y ago
    So it's overdue for Google to sunset it, now that it's at risk of being successful.
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      Choosing a platform which Google itself keeps creating and abandoning alternatives is very, very risky
- price 2y ago
  One of the things that's made us at Zulip very happy with Flutter is that it's an honest-to-goodness functioning open-source project. The issue tracker is out in the open, as are the PRs and code reviews. You can (and we did) show up with bug reports and someone whose job is to develop Flutter will read it and make a cogent reply. And getting a change merged in Flutter is however easy or hard it is to do the change well, but no harder — the codebase is high-quality, and the maintainers are responsive. It's at quite a high percentile among all the open-source projects I've interacted with. I don't know much about Kotlin Multiplatform or Compose Multiplatform. But from what I've seen, the Android group in general doesn't live up to that high standard as an open-source project. You can report bugs and might get a reply, but can't really participate in the discussion; the public bug often gets linked to a bunch of internal bugs you can't see, and the code reviews for any fix happen in private. (I lead the Zulip mobile team, so the decision to use Flutter was primarily mine.)
  - stavros 2y ago
    I hope it works out well for you, at my company we made the decision to go with native because we were afraid of hitting a ceiling with non-native solutions, but I love Zulip and I hope your decision pays off.
  - dzonga 2y ago
    flutter is a complete game changer. I have done react web, vue etc, react native and with shame GWT but with flutter I don't have to think. everything works, all the necessary ui widgets are there. no more tinkering around with css or new css flavor of the month. layout is easy peasy. performance is great. and best, iteration speed is awesome.
    - price 2y ago
      Yeah. The iteration speed with Flutter's fast, solid, hot reload is seriously a big deal for the developer experience.
jerrygoyal 2y ago
one of the killer features of Zulip is that when you mention your local datetime in a message the receiver sees that in their own timezone. So useful when teams are distributed.
- INTPenis 2y ago
  That seems confusing to me. It would be better if Zulip just added the local timezone to the time instead of modifying what you send to people. Do you mean it shows it in a hover or tooltip? Seems like there should be deadly sins for certain fields, and one such deadly sin is for an instant messenger to change what you send to people.
  - infogulch 2y ago
    It appears that you have to type it in a specific format, and the localized time is displayed with different formatting than the rest of the message. See: https://zulip.com/help/global-times https://zulip.com/help/global-times > A date picker will appear once you type `<time`. > Our next meeting is scheduled for <time:2020-05-28T13:30:00+05:30> > A person in San Francisco will see: > Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:00 AM. > While someone in India will see: > Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:30 PM.
    - tyzoid 2y ago
      Discord recognizes <t:{{unix_time}}:format> https://discordtimestamp.com/ https://discordtimestamp.com/
      - tabbott 2y ago
        That's effectively an API feature only: There's no button or typeahead for entering it. Zulip's version is a first-class feature with a compose box button and typeahead, designed to be convenient enough that humans routinely use it rather than typing "10 Pacific time".
  - anderskaseorg 2y ago
scoopr 2y ago
I just recently started up zulip after a long break, to check some particular community discussions. Before it had felt a bit hacky/nerdy. But now, I was pleasantly surprised. The app and the service feels really fast and to the point, and I think it looks OK to. But also that jumping in to random community, and browsing through it made sense to me, I was able to read discussions that kinda seemed interesting and skip the rest, with pretty good confidence! Contrasting to say Discord, where I'm always overwhelmed by the number of channels in big communities, with very little way to efficiently check "whats going on lately", without just browsing through. (I'm sure sizes of communities matters here though) Or Matrix, where everything just seems so slow and janky. Though I think it is trying to solve a harder problem being so distributed. It has real potential bringing related communities closer by having a well curated spaces that organise them neatly.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  It sounds like Zulip is optimising for productivity (and I've read similar from the team in the past), where Discord and Matrix certainly aren't. Matrix is optimising for security/privacy at the cost of UX in other ways, and I get why. Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities – moderation, having distinctive "servers" with their own personalities but within one "service". In many ways Discord is trying to replace phpBB, and no one ran internal company comms on phpBB (I hope). What's interesting to me is that many new companies are choosing Discord despite it clearly not being designed for internal company comms. I suspect some choose it on the basis of being "open source" companies who are trying to grow a community using their stuff, but I'm not sure how true that is in practice for most. I suspect the real reason is that most of these people starting companies already hang out in a bunch of Discord servers in their personal lives, and so there's a (small) network effect and they just default to Discord for their professional lives.
  - sph 2y ago
    > Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities Are they? It seems to me, with their desperate focus on monetisation and gaming (didn't they try to build their app store?) that all their focus is to optimise for "engagement" and keep "gamers" using their platform 24/7 Discord has become like many companies in the space a behemoth that has conquered a niche with a decent product and now are looking to extract as much revenue from each free user. What is the last genuinely killer or novel feature that Discord has released? How are they trying to make online communities better? They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank. Companies like Discord are lucky open-source projects do not have any high-level coordination, but operate like headless chickens, because Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.
cxr 2y ago
> $6.67/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly I like this project. But please stop putting dumb shit like this on the pricing page. There is no such thing. The options are $80 a year, or $8 a month. That's it. Although "$X per month, billed annually" has become a popular and socially acceptable way to be deceptive, it's still deceptive. There are few better ways I can think of to signal that you'd happily lie about a bunch of other stuff if it meant making slightly more money for yourself and you could continue to get by in polite society (limiting yourself to the same deceits that everyone else is engaging in).
- canjobear 2y ago
  What is deceptive here? This seems like a reasonable way to present the information.
  - 2Gkashmiri 2y ago
    > $6.67/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly it doesnt say you have to prepay $80/year. why say "/month billed annually"? what benefit does that give?
    - _flux 2y ago
      It gives you the benefit of seeing the price difference in the long run more easily. Maybe providing also year-long pricing examples of both would be even more helpful.
      - cxr 2y ago
        Grocery stores figured this out years ago. It's by giving that secondary number a subordinate position on the price tag. Not by redesigning the price tag to list the actual options in a misleading way (and then making the customer do even more arithmetic—not less—in order to answer the question, "How much is this going to cost me TODAY?") No one who is doing the "$X per month, billed annually" is doing it because they're trying to make it easiest for the customer. They're doing it because lower numbers on the price tag makes for more sales.
airpoint 2y ago
They keep announcing "design improvements" but whenever I check all I see is an ugly, dated UI I just can't consider serious. Can't be.
- dwb 2y ago
  Looks fine to me; wild that anyone would think it unserious. Design is much more about how it works than following the latest graphic trends.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Not only does it look OK to me, but the UX is second to none. I don't like the modern design trends with white space everywhere, I want to communicate and that means dense information. I think the design issue is more of an HN meme these days, than an actual problem.
    - KronisLV 2y ago
      Most of the time I also enjoy pretty dense UIs, as long as I don’t have a significant risk of misclicking on things that are too small. That said, I rather liked what Thunderbird and JetBrains did - let the user choose not only the fonts and stuff like that, but also the UI density that they want.
      - price 2y ago
        That is in fact one of the new features in this 9.0 release! There's a new less-dense default, and the previous dense layout remains an option (which for myself I immediately turned on). We're also planning to give a wider array of options in an upcoming release, including independently setting the line-height and the font size. It's a lot of work to get even two options to both have a reasonable layout throughout the UI, though (among other things, it involved changing a lot of hardcoded values in px to be in relative units), which is why only the two-way switch made it into this week's release.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
tjoff 2y ago
Zulip had flown under the radar for me, looks interesting but the pricing makes me a bit sad. We are a small team, but would probably need like 11 accounts so with self-hosting that puts up us to just about $40 a month only for the sake of getting mobile notifications. In practice most people won't be on their phones but notifications are still required for off-hours or on-the-move communications. But very low volume, like at current pricing maybe $0.5 per notification that wouldn't have been served by a desktop client. I get it, it is a way to support development. But why does it always have to be per user? And why not keep first 10 users free, so that 11 users only pays for 1 user, 12 for 2 etc. That would mean a lot for small teams, and reflect value a ton better. I guess with every service having a free tier means there truly can't exist a cheap offering. And the minute you go over any of the arbitrary limits you need to suddenly pay a lot. Apparently notifications was completely free until December of last year. From completely free to $3.5 per user. It just feels weird (not saying free is sustainable, but $3.5 per user is a pretty arbitrary number). Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards Zulip, but the entire industry that somehow converged on pretty much the same terms.
- cl3misch 2y ago
  I feel you. On the other hand, paying $40 a month for 11 people to efficiently communicate doesn't sound that much actually?
  - tjoff 2y ago
    Every single service is per user and it adds up. Communications are essential, but there doesn't have to be much to it either. Most communications are 1-1 anyway. We could do everything by SMS and email I guess, it is just not built for that. As a company grows it becomes the backbone but right now I might was well yell out the corridor. Only partially joking.
  - cvwright 2y ago
    Also, that’s about half of what you’d pay for 11 users on most other group chat services. From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.
Silhouette 2y ago
Can it jump to a specific time yet? The inability of a chat app to quickly find a known point in the chat has to be one of the most baffling UI omissions I've ever seen but every time I've searched it seems like I really haven't missed anything and it really does require scrolling back manually for as long as it takes. :(
- anderskaseorg 2y ago
  Not yet, though there’s been some progress on developing this feature. You can upvote https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/23995 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/23995 to help us prioritize it.
chaosprint 2y ago
I sincerely hope that Zulip will get better and better, so I'd better give my opinions directly instead of being polite. If it is charged, wouldn't it be better to invest some money in design? This will greatly improve the user experience. I have to say that I was very confused when I used it last time. Compared with Element, Discord, and Slack, the interface has indeed become a big problem.
- blowski 2y ago
  Do you have any specifics on examples of the design being inferior?
  - chaosprint 2y ago
    I'll talk about the simplest ones, just my personal opinion. - Color. - The organizational logic is not prominent enough, I have to be very careful to find which section is which. Color can help but UX designers should do more. - The default chat box is too small, and it doesn't appear when you click on the channel by default. I only participate when I need to interact with bytecodealliance, and you need to ask more people to get better feedback.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  I found the zulip interface much more intuitive and user friendly than the Discord one which is a huge mess.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  I find the design and usability way superior to Slack. It is also not like Slack that is lagging every time it needs to display some other text (like switching a channel). Instead Zulip feels very smooth. I wish I was using Zulip for work.
CGamesPlay 2y ago
Looks like conversations on Zulip still aren't accessible to search engines, unfortunately. I'm aware of zulip-archive, an "export everything to HTML" solution, but it sucks that this isn't possible to do this without setting up a separate solution.
- anderskaseorg 2y ago
  We’d like to fix this! You can upvote https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 to help us prioritize this feature.
- stavros 2y ago
  Does the new "public channel" feature not solve that?
  - CGamesPlay 2y ago
    Seems it does not: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arust-lang.zulipchat.com+async https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arust-lang.zulipchat.c...
    - stavros 2y ago
      Ah, that's too bad, I thought it would.
pietroppeter 2y ago
After having worked with Teams, Slack, Discord, … Zulip for me is the best. A mix of forum and chat, great search capabilities, customizable notifications. You feel empowered to decide how to filter the noise that can happen in a big community and when to jump in and participate.
- CoolCold 2y ago
  out of Slack and Mattermost, I'm not sure what I miss for work focused workflows - somehow Zulip writes in articles ( https://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/emerging-open-source-team-chat-app-set-to-rival-slack/ https://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/emerging-open-source-team... )it has threads, but both Slack and MM has it too. Probably for "big community" things differ and make you like Zulip more? Or something else? I'm curious.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jonrosner 2y ago
Great update. Unfortunately, the limitation of push notifications to 10 members puts it into the B- category of self-hosted OSS for me. I understand that costs do exist by providing a push service, but forcing Orgs into the same plan as everyone else kind of feels like it's an intentionally set boundary to lurk people in and then force them to go all-in. I'd much rather see another tier that only includes the cost for push notifications.
- jonrosner 2y ago
  E: just checked and they did update their pricing to be 3,50 now for the unlimited push. It's better, but still per-user-based. Which is still bad IMO. It says "Support Zulip's open-source development". I'd happily do that with a fixed price or an honest per-push price.

139 points by Tomte 2y ago

The acquisition Dropbox failed to kill.

> To better match terminology familiar from other apps, “streams” have been renamed to “channels” across the app in this release. Thank God! Hard to believe that it took until 9.0, but they made the right call.

clumsysmurf 2y ago

> We’ve been hard at work on Zulip’s next-generation mobile app for Android and iOS, built with Flutter. Interesting choice to choose Flutter ... will be interesting to see if that was the right choice in the long term. I get the impression Google has more people working on Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform.

the_duke 2y ago
Quite a lot of Flutter apps have popped up over the last few years. It's definitely gaining adoption.
- creshal 2y ago
  So it's overdue for Google to sunset it, now that it's at risk of being successful.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    Choosing a platform which Google itself keeps creating and abandoning alternatives is very, very risky
price 2y ago
One of the things that's made us at Zulip very happy with Flutter is that it's an honest-to-goodness functioning open-source project. The issue tracker is out in the open, as are the PRs and code reviews. You can (and we did) show up with bug reports and someone whose job is to develop Flutter will read it and make a cogent reply. And getting a change merged in Flutter is however easy or hard it is to do the change well, but no harder — the codebase is high-quality, and the maintainers are responsive. It's at quite a high percentile among all the open-source projects I've interacted with. I don't know much about Kotlin Multiplatform or Compose Multiplatform. But from what I've seen, the Android group in general doesn't live up to that high standard as an open-source project. You can report bugs and might get a reply, but can't really participate in the discussion; the public bug often gets linked to a bunch of internal bugs you can't see, and the code reviews for any fix happen in private. (I lead the Zulip mobile team, so the decision to use Flutter was primarily mine.)
- stavros 2y ago
  I hope it works out well for you, at my company we made the decision to go with native because we were afraid of hitting a ceiling with non-native solutions, but I love Zulip and I hope your decision pays off.
- dzonga 2y ago
  flutter is a complete game changer. I have done react web, vue etc, react native and with shame GWT but with flutter I don't have to think. everything works, all the necessary ui widgets are there. no more tinkering around with css or new css flavor of the month. layout is easy peasy. performance is great. and best, iteration speed is awesome.
  - price 2y ago
    Yeah. The iteration speed with Flutter's fast, solid, hot reload is seriously a big deal for the developer experience.

jerrygoyal 2y ago

one of the killer features of Zulip is that when you mention your local datetime in a message the receiver sees that in their own timezone. So useful when teams are distributed.

INTPenis 2y ago
That seems confusing to me. It would be better if Zulip just added the local timezone to the time instead of modifying what you send to people. Do you mean it shows it in a hover or tooltip? Seems like there should be deadly sins for certain fields, and one such deadly sin is for an instant messenger to change what you send to people.
- infogulch 2y ago
  It appears that you have to type it in a specific format, and the localized time is displayed with different formatting than the rest of the message. See: https://zulip.com/help/global-times https://zulip.com/help/global-times > A date picker will appear once you type `<time`. > Our next meeting is scheduled for <time:2020-05-28T13:30:00+05:30> > A person in San Francisco will see: > Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:00 AM. > While someone in India will see: > Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:30 PM.
  - tyzoid 2y ago
    Discord recognizes <t:{{unix_time}}:format> https://discordtimestamp.com/ https://discordtimestamp.com/
    - tabbott 2y ago
      That's effectively an API feature only: There's no button or typeahead for entering it. Zulip's version is a first-class feature with a compose box button and typeahead, designed to be convenient enough that humans routinely use it rather than typing "10 Pacific time".
- anderskaseorg 2y ago

scoopr 2y ago

I just recently started up zulip after a long break, to check some particular community discussions. Before it had felt a bit hacky/nerdy. But now, I was pleasantly surprised. The app and the service feels really fast and to the point, and I think it looks OK to. But also that jumping in to random community, and browsing through it made sense to me, I was able to read discussions that kinda seemed interesting and skip the rest, with pretty good confidence! Contrasting to say Discord, where I'm always overwhelmed by the number of channels in big communities, with very little way to efficiently check "whats going on lately", without just browsing through. (I'm sure sizes of communities matters here though) Or Matrix, where everything just seems so slow and janky. Though I think it is trying to solve a harder problem being so distributed. It has real potential bringing related communities closer by having a well curated spaces that organise them neatly.

danpalmer 2y ago
It sounds like Zulip is optimising for productivity (and I've read similar from the team in the past), where Discord and Matrix certainly aren't. Matrix is optimising for security/privacy at the cost of UX in other ways, and I get why. Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities – moderation, having distinctive "servers" with their own personalities but within one "service". In many ways Discord is trying to replace phpBB, and no one ran internal company comms on phpBB (I hope). What's interesting to me is that many new companies are choosing Discord despite it clearly not being designed for internal company comms. I suspect some choose it on the basis of being "open source" companies who are trying to grow a community using their stuff, but I'm not sure how true that is in practice for most. I suspect the real reason is that most of these people starting companies already hang out in a bunch of Discord servers in their personal lives, and so there's a (small) network effect and they just default to Discord for their professional lives.
- sph 2y ago
  > Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities Are they? It seems to me, with their desperate focus on monetisation and gaming (didn't they try to build their app store?) that all their focus is to optimise for "engagement" and keep "gamers" using their platform 24/7 Discord has become like many companies in the space a behemoth that has conquered a niche with a decent product and now are looking to extract as much revenue from each free user. What is the last genuinely killer or novel feature that Discord has released? How are they trying to make online communities better? They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank. Companies like Discord are lucky open-source projects do not have any high-level coordination, but operate like headless chickens, because Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.

cxr 2y ago

> $6.67/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly I like this project. But please stop putting dumb shit like this on the pricing page. There is no such thing. The options are $80 a year, or $8 a month. That's it. Although "$X per month, billed annually" has become a popular and socially acceptable way to be deceptive, it's still deceptive. There are few better ways I can think of to signal that you'd happily lie about a bunch of other stuff if it meant making slightly more money for yourself and you could continue to get by in polite society (limiting yourself to the same deceits that everyone else is engaging in).

canjobear 2y ago
What is deceptive here? This seems like a reasonable way to present the information.
- 2Gkashmiri 2y ago
  > $6.67/user/month billed annually or $8 billed monthly it doesnt say you have to prepay $80/year. why say "/month billed annually"? what benefit does that give?
  - _flux 2y ago
    It gives you the benefit of seeing the price difference in the long run more easily. Maybe providing also year-long pricing examples of both would be even more helpful.
    - cxr 2y ago
      Grocery stores figured this out years ago. It's by giving that secondary number a subordinate position on the price tag. Not by redesigning the price tag to list the actual options in a misleading way (and then making the customer do even more arithmetic—not less—in order to answer the question, "How much is this going to cost me TODAY?") No one who is doing the "$X per month, billed annually" is doing it because they're trying to make it easiest for the customer. They're doing it because lower numbers on the price tag makes for more sales.

airpoint 2y ago

They keep announcing "design improvements" but whenever I check all I see is an ugly, dated UI I just can't consider serious. Can't be.

dwb 2y ago
Looks fine to me; wild that anyone would think it unserious. Design is much more about how it works than following the latest graphic trends.
- stavros 2y ago
  Not only does it look OK to me, but the UX is second to none. I don't like the modern design trends with white space everywhere, I want to communicate and that means dense information. I think the design issue is more of an HN meme these days, than an actual problem.
  - KronisLV 2y ago
    Most of the time I also enjoy pretty dense UIs, as long as I don’t have a significant risk of misclicking on things that are too small. That said, I rather liked what Thunderbird and JetBrains did - let the user choose not only the fonts and stuff like that, but also the UI density that they want.
    - price 2y ago
      That is in fact one of the new features in this 9.0 release! There's a new less-dense default, and the previous dense layout remains an option (which for myself I immediately turned on). We're also planning to give a wider array of options in an upcoming release, including independently setting the line-height and the font size. It's a lot of work to get even two options to both have a reasonable layout throughout the UI, though (among other things, it involved changing a lot of hardcoded values in px to be in relative units), which is why only the two-way switch made it into this week's release.
zelphirkalt 2y ago

tjoff 2y ago

Zulip had flown under the radar for me, looks interesting but the pricing makes me a bit sad. We are a small team, but would probably need like 11 accounts so with self-hosting that puts up us to just about $40 a month only for the sake of getting mobile notifications. In practice most people won't be on their phones but notifications are still required for off-hours or on-the-move communications. But very low volume, like at current pricing maybe $0.5 per notification that wouldn't have been served by a desktop client. I get it, it is a way to support development. But why does it always have to be per user? And why not keep first 10 users free, so that 11 users only pays for 1 user, 12 for 2 etc. That would mean a lot for small teams, and reflect value a ton better. I guess with every service having a free tier means there truly can't exist a cheap offering. And the minute you go over any of the arbitrary limits you need to suddenly pay a lot. Apparently notifications was completely free until December of last year. From completely free to $3.5 per user. It just feels weird (not saying free is sustainable, but $3.5 per user is a pretty arbitrary number). Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards Zulip, but the entire industry that somehow converged on pretty much the same terms.

cl3misch 2y ago
I feel you. On the other hand, paying $40 a month for 11 people to efficiently communicate doesn't sound that much actually?
- tjoff 2y ago
  Every single service is per user and it adds up. Communications are essential, but there doesn't have to be much to it either. Most communications are 1-1 anyway. We could do everything by SMS and email I guess, it is just not built for that. As a company grows it becomes the backbone but right now I might was well yell out the corridor. Only partially joking.
- cvwright 2y ago
  Also, that’s about half of what you’d pay for 11 users on most other group chat services. From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.

Silhouette 2y ago

Can it jump to a specific time yet? The inability of a chat app to quickly find a known point in the chat has to be one of the most baffling UI omissions I've ever seen but every time I've searched it seems like I really haven't missed anything and it really does require scrolling back manually for as long as it takes. :(

anderskaseorg 2y ago
Not yet, though there’s been some progress on developing this feature. You can upvote https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/23995 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/23995 to help us prioritize it.

chaosprint 2y ago

I sincerely hope that Zulip will get better and better, so I'd better give my opinions directly instead of being polite. If it is charged, wouldn't it be better to invest some money in design? This will greatly improve the user experience. I have to say that I was very confused when I used it last time. Compared with Element, Discord, and Slack, the interface has indeed become a big problem.

blowski 2y ago
Do you have any specifics on examples of the design being inferior?
- chaosprint 2y ago
  I'll talk about the simplest ones, just my personal opinion. - Color. - The organizational logic is not prominent enough, I have to be very careful to find which section is which. Color can help but UX designers should do more. - The default chat box is too small, and it doesn't appear when you click on the channel by default. I only participate when I need to interact with bytecodealliance, and you need to ask more people to get better feedback.
prmoustache 2y ago
I found the zulip interface much more intuitive and user friendly than the Discord one which is a huge mess.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
I find the design and usability way superior to Slack. It is also not like Slack that is lagging every time it needs to display some other text (like switching a channel). Instead Zulip feels very smooth. I wish I was using Zulip for work.

CGamesPlay 2y ago

Looks like conversations on Zulip still aren't accessible to search engines, unfortunately. I'm aware of zulip-archive, an "export everything to HTML" solution, but it sucks that this isn't possible to do this without setting up a separate solution.

anderskaseorg 2y ago
We’d like to fix this! You can upvote https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 to help us prioritize this feature.
stavros 2y ago
Does the new "public channel" feature not solve that?
- CGamesPlay 2y ago
  Seems it does not: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arust-lang.zulipchat.com+async https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arust-lang.zulipchat.c...
  - stavros 2y ago
    Ah, that's too bad, I thought it would.

pietroppeter 2y ago

After having worked with Teams, Slack, Discord, … Zulip for me is the best. A mix of forum and chat, great search capabilities, customizable notifications. You feel empowered to decide how to filter the noise that can happen in a big community and when to jump in and participate.

CoolCold 2y ago
out of Slack and Mattermost, I'm not sure what I miss for work focused workflows - somehow Zulip writes in articles ( https://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/emerging-open-source-team-chat-app-set-to-rival-slack/ https://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/emerging-open-source-team... )it has threads, but both Slack and MM has it too. Probably for "big community" things differ and make you like Zulip more? Or something else? I'm curious.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jonrosner 2y ago

Great update. Unfortunately, the limitation of push notifications to 10 members puts it into the B- category of self-hosted OSS for me. I understand that costs do exist by providing a push service, but forcing Orgs into the same plan as everyone else kind of feels like it's an intentionally set boundary to lurk people in and then force them to go all-in. I'd much rather see another tier that only includes the cost for push notifications.

jonrosner 2y ago
E: just checked and they did update their pricing to be 3,50 now for the unlimited push. It's better, but still per-user-based. Which is still bad IMO. It says "Support Zulip's open-source development". I'd happily do that with a fixed price or an honest per-push price.