20 ms·

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasiz

by tabbott 8mo ago

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their identity. Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are: - Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade. - Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :) - Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc. - It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that ~1500 people have successfully contributed code to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business. - We are a values-focused organization (https://zulip.com/values/ https://zulip.com/values/) where providing a public service is important to us all. - Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE). I'm happy to answer any questions.

goalieca 8mo ago
> Given current events in the USA, This part absolutely isn't necessary because it's a wrong idea no matter who is in charge.
easterncalculus 8mo ago
What is the video calling and screen share experience like?
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  Zulip "shells out" to other apps like Zoom or Jitsi for this with a light integration in the UI.
  - Firehawke 8mo ago
    I'd call that a pretty major feature omission since it means splitting things across multiple apps.
    - justincormack 8mo ago
      No different to ising Slack and Zoom which is a very common combination.
      - sumeno 8mo ago
        It is when you're talking about competing with Discord which has very good voice and streaming support
    - shimman 8mo ago
      Why is it a major feature omission? Screen sharing isn't an easily solvable problem, there aren't any good FOSS libraries out there (at least that I'm aware of). Expecting a way way way smaller team that didn't get $1billion in founding, like Discord did, is an extremely poor mindset to have. All you're proving is the need to implement a tech tax to force companies to fund FOSS at the behest of the federal government, which frankly I'm all for.
      - sumeno 8mo ago
        It's a major omission because the voice and video integration is one of Discord's killer features. Sorry that it's hard, but something that doesn't integrate those seamlessly isn't a discord alternative
        shimman 8mo ago
        Okay, I'm sure if they got $1billion in funding they could implement the same feature but expecting a way smaller team with way less resources to have parity with such a company is just unrealistic.
areoform 8mo ago
Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without handholding?
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  Data point of one: in my small community group that has moved to Zulip we do have a grandma contributing. No jocks though so I can't speak to that. I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how hyperactive the UI is.
  - Vinnl 8mo ago
    As a software engineer who's had to interact with Discord only a handful of times, I had no idea when other people could hear me or where I had to click to find people I was looking for.
    - crabmusket 8mo ago
      I've only rarely used it for voice, so I think I'm not in the right demographic. But I find its text/chat UI janky as hell.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  I'd say so, especially if you start on desktop and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video. We are satisfied with what we see with our internal usability studies with nontechnical users. Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is this one: https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ > Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate with their team leads. “Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years. I would recommend doing a little training/handholding call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true for any new app. My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a signature, like you would an email. :)
crabmusket 8mo ago
I recently moved a small community group from Slack to Zulip. Half because of the UX for infrequent visitors (topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"). And half because of your organisational values, which are more aligned with ours than are those of Salesforce. The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit. Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the Zulip team work in public is inspiring!
- NooneAtAll3 8mo ago
  > topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general" my experience is exact opposite
  - katsudon 8mo ago
    How so? I haven’t used Zulip but am curious to hear why
    - adastra22 8mo ago
      Not the person you are replying to, but I much prefer catching up on a small number of channels, than having to click around a bunch of different individual topics. But it is a tradeoff.
      - crabmusket 8mo ago
        You don't have to click into topics. Zulip has a "channel view" which lets you see all messages in a channel, chronologically, just like Slack or Discord or IRC. That's actually the default experience when you click on a channel in the sidebar. It also has an "entire server" view if you want to see everything in one stream.
        adastra22 8mo ago
        I see thank you!
IgorPartola 8mo ago
How does Zulip compare to Campfire and Stoat (and other FOSS) efforts? How is onboarding for non-tech people?
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Onboarding has a thread going here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951401. My understanding is that Campfire hasn't been actively developed for ~10 years (https://once.com/campfire/changelog https://once.com/campfire/changelog shows some minor fixes after the OSS launch; their GitHub has no 2026 commits). There are no mobile apps. It is not an actively maintained Discord alternative. Stoat is early in development. For example, https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat has 1421 commits, compared with 68K for https://github.com/zulip/zulip/ https://github.com/zulip/zulip/. I wish them luck! It's really important that we have multiple independent efforts. https://www.rocket.chat/ https://www.rocket.chat/ and https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/ are open-core military contractors these days. You'll see what I mean if you visit their websites. But like Zulip, they are full-featured team chat systems, and if the parts of their system that are OSS work for your organization, they're certainly valid options. Finally there is Matrix/Element. They have an inspiring vision and similar values to mine, and I'd recommend checking it out. Element/Matrix is built on an ambitious distributed consensus protocol with an E2EE option, which provides capabilities Zulip don't have but also adds complexity. Zulip is focused on just doing team chat really well, and does not support more than ~100K users in an instance. Hopefully will have a lot more resources now, thanks to Current Events. I wish the Element team the very best of luck! ---------------------------------------- Overall, Zulip's focus has always been on making a delightful chat experience, especially when you have multiple conversations happening at the same time. We aren't trying to build a clone, but instead the best possible experience for having lots of possibly complex conversations. So there will be some differences from what you're used to. But critically, we spend a very large amount of our time relentlessly fixing micro-interactions that annoy us or are reported to us. If you read #design, #issues, and #feedback in https://zulip.com/development-community/ https://zulip.com/development-community/, you'll get an idea of how we work. So while there's some features we don't have that are present in other products, and we don't have dozens of designers on staff to do cool end-of-year animated reports like Discord does, you can expect few bugs and a lot of interaction design polish. ----------------------------------------- The one mistake that I think a lot of folks make in evaluating options is focusing on buzzwords like E2EE without thinking through their threat model. E2EE doesn't add much practical security over self-hosting for many threat models, and it comes with significant usability trade-offs. And some current E2EE systems don't actually protect against a malicious server, say because they only protect message content, not metadata like who has access to what... just against raiding the server's disk. (For example, WhatsApp has E2EE for message content, but I expect Meta's databases know everyone who's had a conversation with me on WhatsApp and the precise timestamps and approximate lengths of every message I've sent or received on the platform. And apparently some keyboard apps send what you're typing to remote servers!).
bloqs 8mo ago
Sold
stefanka 8mo ago
Thank you! Zulip is a great project.
sleepybrett 8mo ago
Looking for your features but no voice chat, no screen sharing, no deal.
- barbs 8mo ago
  Looks like it has integration with Jitsi Meet https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi
  - sleepybrett 8mo ago
    in slack and discord i don't need another app i just hit the huddle button (in slack) and join a voice chat room in discord. This is the problem with pitching zulip to this audience. The original thing that got gamers to switch to discord, it was their original and probably still is their primary target market, was a single login to a huge universe of voice chat rooms. Before discord gamers were setting up/renting teamspeak and ventrillo services (that were voice chat only). Hell for the first couple of years of using discord with my gaming group the only thing anyone ever posted in text was what time they were going to be on and what game they wanted to play.
    - bschwarz 8mo ago
      I would say the main thing that got people to switch to Discord was the fact that voice chat was free, paid for by VC money.
      - sleepybrett 8mo ago
        sure but also that you didn't have to pass around your teamspeak/ventrillo information to every rando you wanted to play with, less friction in discord with invite links etc
    - prmoustache 8mo ago
      I have never created an account nor logged on to use jitsi.
- 8mo ago
BrouteMinou 8mo ago
Why zulip instead of the good ol' IRC?
- orblivion 8mo ago
  It has modern features. It stores message history. It has a fairly unique feature of letting you create ad-hoc "topics" (that go under a "Channel") that make it easier to manage the flood of conversation.
  - crabmusket 8mo ago
    Channels + topics >>> just channels
- ThePowerOfFuet 8mo ago
  1: IRC loses all messages to you while you are not connected
  - 3836293648 8mo ago
    Not for years. If that is still the case for you, ask your server hosts to update to a version that supports ircv3
  - theandrewbailey 8mo ago
    https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory says hi
    - d3Xt3r 8mo ago
      Know of a good IRCv3 client for Linux/Web/Android? And what are some good v3 servers these days, besides Libera?
      - theandrewbailey 8mo ago
        I've set up Ergo and KiwiIRC before, and it seemed pretty cool. I even enabled the Jitsi plugin in KiwiIRC, so it was like an indie alternative to Slack or Teams. I turned it off years ago, but if I were to do that again, I might try with UnrealIRCd.
Valk3_ 8mo ago
> Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :) Could you expand on this?
- bo1024 8mo ago
  Slack has basically one main hierarchy level (messages are grouped into channels) while Zulip has two, streams and topics. So you can create a stream for each project (say) and create a different topic for any given point that needs discussion about that project. Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn’t get in the way of the other threads.
  - crabmusket 8mo ago
    > didn’t get in the way of the other threads But also, critically, if you want to, you can drop back to the "show me everything sequentially" view. Threads hide discussions away - which is good when you want to focus on something else, but bad when you can't remember where a discussion was.
    - folmar 8mo ago
      The killer feateure is that it's very easy to move last $x messages to another topic, so if someone writes a short note that begins a conversation everyone is free to reorganize it, and also moving messages between threads is easy and nice.
  - jwiz 8mo ago
    From what I have read (not having actually used Zulip) it always sounded like the chats were threaded in the same way that mailing lists or newsgroups are threaded. How accurate is that understanding?
    - crabmusket 8mo ago
bo1024 8mo ago
What’s the state of accessibility on Zulip? (Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)
- tabbott 8mo ago
  You can do everything with the keyboard, and we do write everything with screenreader accessibility and colorblindness accessibility in mind. But we don't have a dedicated accessibility tester on staff, so we're reliant on people reporting issues that bother them in actual use. I should also mention there's a nice TUI app: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal, which can be helpful for some people.
  - bo1024 8mo ago
    Thank you! I'd like to convince other parts of my organization to move to Zulip, this will help.
rw_grim 8mo ago
This is great to hear and ironically we (Pidgin) just decided that Zulip was going to be the next protocol we were going to add support for just barely 24 hours ago before all this Discord nonsense! https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/12 https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Awesome, feel free to start a thread in #integrations in chat.zulip.org! We'd be happy to chat about some of the things that will make your life easier to do carefully when writing a new client. The main thing regards our double-entry API changelog system. Basically, the API documentation for individual endpoints, say https://zulip.com/api/get-user https://zulip.com/api/get-user, natively cover for each endpoint all the changes relevant for that endpoint from https://zulip.com/api/changelog https://zulip.com/api/changelog... and how to write nice code using feature level checks to support all server versions.
  - rw_grim 8mo ago
    That sounds great! I literally just wrote the initial skeleton last night so there's lots of work to do so any help is greatly appreciated! I'm hoping to have something somewhat usable by the end of the month.
- drzaiusx11 8mo ago
  Happy to hear Pidgin is still at it after all these decades. I still fondly remember using it when it was still called Gaim and only spoke OSCAR, back when Rob was involved before he started Asterisk. I lurked on IRC back then and even made a simple TUI when libpurple first came out.
OsrsNeedsf2P 8mo ago
> Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade. You lost me there. I need to have all my contacts on Zulip. Nothing else matters to me
- esseph 8mo ago
  Then you're fucked, and stuck on big tech and hostile governments. If you can't convince friends to move, that is.
sgarman 8mo ago
My biggest feature use of Discord is the drop in / out voice with PTT. I couldn't quite tell if this feature exist.
- dijit 8mo ago
  Doesn’t exist in Zulip, theres a “camera” button that generates a jitsi link, I tried (and failed) to make it a google meet link, but it works surprisingly well, though it is a context switch.
  - tabbott 8mo ago
    Yeah Google Meet doesn't have an API to just create a call; several people have tried to hook together the Calendar APIs to make a reasonable similar integration and failed. I assume this API omission is intentional on Google's part but don't understand the motivation.
    - GreenWatermelon 8mo ago
      Google workspace integrates with google meet. It's likely they don't want a competitor to google chat that uses meet infra.
- gpvos 8mo ago
  PTT = push to talk (at least that seems the most probable match on Wikipedia)
dijit 8mo ago
Hey, just wanted to say that I am a happy Zulip customer. I used it at my previous employer and after a month of hangringing from people- many did not desire to go back to what we had before. (though some people did say they wanted Slack for the emojis and “prettiness”). Now I started in a new position and I’ve positioned Zulip (on prem) as the only viable solution since we’re shirking SaaS as a strategic move. The people who followed me to the new place are quite glad of this, or at least thats what I am told. So, thank you, sincerely.
- pixelatedindex 8mo ago
  > hangringing I’m sorry to be that guy but it’s “handwringing” - twisting your hand like you wring your clothes until you agree
  - crabmusket 8mo ago
    > like twisting your hand until you agree I'm also gonna be that guy - hand wringing is a stereotype of an expression of distress, not coercion. You're thinking of the idiom "twisting someone's arm".
  - dwb 8mo ago
    I believe it was actually meant to be haranguing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/haranguing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/harangui...
  - dijit 8mo ago
    Hey man, don't be sorry! I actually didn't know so this was a good correction! :) I think you got flagged for the "incorrect" definition, but I think you were being playful with a mnemonic to remember it- so that's not fair.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Thanks so much for sharing the story!
deafpolygon 8mo ago
I don’t have any questions as of yet, but reading your site; it speaks to me and those values align with mine. Just wanted to say that I think the world could use a bit more of this.
caconym_ 8mo ago
I'm asking because I hate Matrix and actually want you to convince me: why should I accept the risk of migrating my friend group from Discord to Zulip, which has already "broken the seal" of restricting features behind a monthly fee even for self-hosted users, when I could migrate us to Matrix instead? Matrix seems like the much less risky option. I see that you have a "community" tier that's free and doesn't restrict notifications, but it's not clear to me exactly what's involved in proving that we should qualify.
- ameliaquining 8mo ago
  Mobile push notifications are a special case because it's literally not technically possible to self-host them. Or rather, it's possible if you build the iOS and Android apps from source and distribute them through TestFlight or an analogous Android channel, but it's not possible for the developer of an App Store or Play Store app to allow its users to point it at a different push-notification server, because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary. So if you want your self-hosted Zulip server to work with the Zulip client apps in the App Store and Play Store, you have to use Zulip's push server, and there's nothing Zulip can do to fix that. Matrix works analogously; if you use the Element app from the App Store or Play Store, then you're using Element's push notification server, even if your Matrix homeserver is self-hosted. It's possible that Element allows their server to be used gratis in situations where Zulip charges a fee, I don't know their policies or anything, but in principle Matrix still leaves you exactly as dependent on a third party's goodwill unless you make your friends install a privately distributed mobile app. Zulip IIUC does not restrict self-hosting of any feature that's technically possible to self-host.
  - cyberax 8mo ago
    > because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary Nope. On iOS the flow is: 1. Generate a "push token" on the device (with the user's approval). 2. Send this token to your server. 3. Now you can send notifications to the device via this token. Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account. But it's not linked to an individual app. The situation is different on Android. Google went out of their way to make it impossible to customize `google-services.json` at runtime. So the built-in "easy" flow won't work. But notifications ultimately work using veeeeery obfuscated remote procedure calls to Google Play Services and you can run them manually. I need to do a write-up about this....
zukzuk 8mo ago
Glad to hear E2EE is coming soon, but it’s been “soon” for probably a year now. It’s a bit odd that encrypted notifications still don’t work, and I’d argue it’s a very big caveat with regard to privacy and security. Our main reason for using Zulip is that we work in a highly regulated space (healthcare) and would like to be able to safely talk about things. I suspect this sort of situation is a major motivator for Zulip adoption, so it’s weird that transit encryption was left as an afterthought.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  (There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications). Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0. Some important context is that we retired the old React Native mobile app this summer in favor of the new Flutter apps (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launched/ https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...), which has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the app and developer experience. But as you can imagine, the cutover and relentlessly addressing feedback after it took a lot of time for the mobile team. We've also experienced an AI slop bombardment in the last few months that has consumed a lot of time. I'll save that story for another time.
  - GreenWatermelon 8mo ago
    What was wrong with React Native that caused it to be slow? How did you figure out that flutter was the reason for improved performance, rather than simply rebuilding the app with lessons learned from the old app? Put another way, given enough time, what was not possible to do with react Native and is now possible with flutter?
rustystump 8mo ago
First time hearing about this project and it feels mature. However, the landing page example of the app on web is…messy and noisy to the point i am totally lost. This is not the case for slack or discord. I think having an awesome clean first impression would do wonders to sell what younare doing.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Can you give more specific feedback -- what specifically are you looking at, and what specifically do you think contributes to it being noisy?
  - duskdozer 8mo ago
    Well for me it's the animations, and it doesn't seem like prefers-reduced-motion is handled anywhere. I go to some great lengths to try to eliminate animations with custom js/css, and things are still moving and changing. The logos are probably most immediately noticeable.
jhasse 8mo ago
[flagged]
- zer0zzz 8mo ago
  Why would you ask this?
  - paulryanrogers 8mo ago
    Because X is becoming a Nazi bar.
    - zer0zzz 8mo ago
      Oh yeah
assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
>>Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be I've been putting my pants on every morning for the last several years, had breakfast, gone to work, and come home without worrying about any current events in the USA and my life seems no different than 50 years ago except I have modern gadgets. Social media is not the world. In fact, it's 10% of what the real world is like and how the real world thinks. It's why I ignore social media except for HN and one other but I only scan the headlines and rarely pop into comments like this. And I'm happy. EDIT: And the comments below are proof why you, too, should ignore all social media and why you, too, will be happier.
- lostlogin 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- DauntingPear7 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- dc96 8mo ago
  Fixed this for you: "I haven’t been affected, so everyone else is overreacting."
  - pb7 8mo ago
    Almost no one has been affected so yes.
    - wredcoll 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
        I never liked this quote, because it makes help a matter of anticipated reciprocal help rather than simply a good thing to do. Besides, memories are short.
jsemrau 8mo ago
[flagged]
- paradox460 8mo ago
  Yes, but it's fashionable to blame the US for things
- mr_woozy 8mo ago
  [dead]
grayhatter 8mo ago
Because I have some experience with FOSS, I know you don't get the recognition that you deserve. So on behalf of everyone who's too distracted to say thank you. Thank you! Admittedly, it did take a day (less than), but once I got used to the interface Zulip provides. It's better than what I would have asked for! It's phenomenal software! The whole experience is better than anything else that exists. And everyone charging for the same features should feel embarrassed given how much better Zulip is! Genuinely, it's impressive what y'all have created. So thank you!
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  Yes, hear hear! As someone who've run a couple of FOSS communities, many of them having chats via IRC, Slack, Discord, forums and more, using Zulip has always been one of the most welcome options, yet also the one that takes the longest for people to understand if they've never seen it. But it's easily worth it, as you can actually come back and read through old discussions and understand things and it isn't a mess. It's like if you could force Slack/Discord to only do threads, and the entire UI is optimizing for that specific UX. Overall pleasant experience once you get over the initial bump :)
  - k12sosse 8mo ago
    This feels like you're chatting with yourself.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      I think you need to invite more people to your Zulip instance if you keep feeling like you're chatting with yourself.
31337Logic 8mo ago
Thanks so much for this!!
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
pocksuppet 8mo ago
> Given current events in the USA Don't worry - they're repealing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The one that says platforms aren't liable for what their users post. This means there will be no platforms at all very soon.
- fumar 8mo ago
  What is the purpose of repealing this act? Make platforms liable and thus enact more restrictions, is that right?
  - LastTrain 8mo ago
    Makes selective political retribution easier.
  - pbhjpbhj 8mo ago
    As you suggest, it's clearly to curtail free speech further; but in a way that their supporters can claim isn't fascist because 'it's the companies doing it not the government'. We do really need non-USA based social media, stat.
    - pocksuppet 8mo ago
      Companies already have the right to curtail space as much as they want. The government wants to force companies to ban left-wing speech.
- drstewart 8mo ago
  >Don't worry I'm not worried. We'll use Zulip which has values and thus takes responsibility for everything its users post, right?
minneapoliced 8mo ago
[flagged]
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  > enforcing the law This is like believing DOGE was about efficiency :)
- voxl 8mo ago
  Yes, American Hitler is in fact Hitler perhaps you're cool with: 1. Extrajudicious execution of US citizens 2. Construction of concentration camps 3. Openly saying that you'll interfere with state elections 4. Openly saying you'll take away guns and dimish gun rights Let's just be honest with ourselves. No one. And I mean no one, can support Donald Trump and be a principled decent human being, conservative or otherwise.
- JuniperMesos 8mo ago
  Understandable, but sometimes there isn't a better alternative that doesn't do user support via Discord. That's why it's important to have alternatives that work, so unrelated companies don't pick centralized platform chat software that happens to be convenient for their immediate needs.
8note 8mo ago
how does zulip as a technical solution solve the ultimate problems with discord and gmail and so on - EU chat control, US porn control, etc? arent you as a zulip instance owner going to have to implement all the same stuff as discord?
- smelendez 8mo ago
  It depends on what you’re doing with the instance, where you and your users are located, etc. If you create an invite-only Zulip chat for your pub trivia league or school parent association that’s all adults, probably not.
numbers 8mo ago
man, I want to support something like Zulip, I would even want to work on a product like this but one thing I'd say is you have to go back and study why Slack beat Hipchat and others. It's so simple in hindsight but it was the marketing and the UI/UX of Slack that made it so much easier to use. If you'd like, I have a ton of ideas and experience building UIs and would love to give you some of my input. Too much typing for a comment at the moment.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  You should stop by #feedback in chat.zulip.org and share your ideas! Regarding the history: Slack had very effective marketing, powered by a lot of venture capital. And HipChat was a weak product that had an embarrassing total hack, which did not leave customers with confidence that their data was safe there. Zulip is not venture-funded, so we're reliant on people sharing it with others to get the word out. As a side note, I don't think Slack could have succeeded if it launched today. Microsoft Teams has far far more users as Slack, and it's slopware. You can thank the end of anti-trust enforcement for that.
  - drzaiusx11 8mo ago
    Fun fact: Shortly after MS Teams launched I created an internal "reconstituted" desktop Teams client for myself and the poor souls in my org that had MS Teams thrust upon them. It extracted resources from the (unminified!) electron app as well the js and CSS files from their web version, then repackaged it again via electron, wrapping into a standalone executable. Think like a really complicated greasemonkey/tampermonkey script. My fork at the time replaced their criminal white space use and offered a more compact and information dense alternative using CSS and JavaScript, injected all post rendering. Ah, the silly things one is capable when faced with a minor inconvenience and a wandering mind...
LastTrain 8mo ago
You are referring to yourself as an “organization”, can you define that precisely?
wellthisisgreat 8mo ago
LOVE Zulip!
VoidWhisperer 8mo ago
Based on some (admittedly very surface level) research, one spot where Zulip will still struggle to replace Discord is Voice/Video chats and Screensharing - the little I could find about voice chatting in zulip is that it has to be configured to use an external service (jitsi, zoom, etc)
- tabbott 8mo ago
  If you do no configuration, it'll use the public Jitsi service for video calls. So no action required unless you want a different video call provider.
sankhao 8mo ago
Thanks for your work. Moved my company from Slack to self-hosted Zulip after Salesforce unilaterally decided to transfer our account to Alibaba Cloud and the transition has been very smooth. We especially appreciate proper markdown support !
- reciprocity 8mo ago
  Wow what the hell, Salesforce.
scotty79 8mo ago
It's kind of weird that e2ee is kind of afterthought everywhere. If I was making a chat system I'd obviously didn't want to keep anything that the users talk about on my servers unencrypted or decryptable. Why would you? If something is supposed to be public then keep it. If not, don't. The weird "we pinky promise to try to keep it non-public for some time" is a weird idea.
- wredcoll 8mo ago
  It turns out e2ee in a chatroom is really, really, really difficult.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Most consumers don't know the difference between "encryption" and "end-to-end encryption". Zulip uses standard TLS encryption, where the messages are encrypted in transit, but the server has access to the messages. The server having access to the messages is extremely useful for many key features. Access control policies. Search. Markdown rendering that can make guarantees to clients about its behavior. Mobile notifications for mentions. And many more. There's options for all of these problems, but it's /hard/ and you end up having a lot of risk of nasty bugs where "all the message history become unreadable" and a lot of performance issues. This is why why end-to-end encrypted messenger apps like Signal are extremely minimal with basically no chat features, and can take a while to load long conversations ... there's a lot of expensive cryptography happening in the background. AFAIK it's not realistic to use the Signal protocol with the volume of messages people do in high-traffic Discord or Zulip communities. Some other E2EE chat systems have more features but fail to actually provide end-to-end security. (For example, the server provides the source code for the web app and can freely modify that code to steal all the messages the user can still read, or the server is still in charge of metadata like channel membership ... so a malicious server could just add a fake user to every channel). You get almost all of the security benefits of these "E2EE" chat systems by having a trusted person self-host the server, and setting a message retention policy if you want messages in certain channels to be automatically be deleted after a period of time. Our vision for Zulip is not billions of people on our Cloud service. People should own their own communities, not corporations. And in that world, usually the person who runs the community can be trusted to host it.
pcthrowaway 8mo ago
Do you know if migrating from Mattermost to Zulip is remotely possible? I had been using Mattermost because it's also (mostly) FOSS. However, they've recently been changing their released OSS edition to restrict capabilities... Unfortunately the org I maintain it for is having some issues with it now and I have metaphorical egg on my face.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Yep, it's easy: https://zulip.com/help/import-from-mattermost https://zulip.com/help/import-from-mattermost.
phantomathkg 8mo ago
Self hosting could be an option, but it does not help when a country require you to identify if a user is adult or not.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  Doesn't self hosting usually exempt you? Most such regulations only apply to commercial entities above some minimum user count. While I personally strongly favor federated solutions those are of significantly more concern in this regard.
  - sfn42 8mo ago
    Good luck telling a FOSS project what to do. At the very least you'd have to pay for the work and it seems to me they could claim whatever price they want.
tonymet 8mo ago
very good take. IMO "current events" goes back to The Patriot Act if not further. Aggressive digital surveillance by 3-letter-agencies has been active for 20-60 years
JohnTHaller 8mo ago
Hi Tim. For pricing, it would seem that large, public-facing, Discord-style organizations would have to go with the free plan to avoid the pricing being prohibitive. Think something like the new Limewire community on Discord which has 2 million members. Or am I missing something about what a 'user' is considered in terms of being billable or not? On a related note, I'm gonna check out Zulip for PortableApps.com. Any interest in having the Windows desktop app be portable? (We'd love to do that if we wind up using it)
- tabbott 8mo ago
  The advertised pricing is for workplace use where the users are on payroll; if you read the plans page carefully you'll see we have free or highly discounted pricing for other use cases, both in Cloud and self-hosted. Zulip is not designed to support 2M user accounts in a single organization. But if you enable the public access option (https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option), such that no account is required just to read content, you can end up with 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer "total accounts" that just wanted to see something once and don't actually use the server.
  - JohnTHaller 8mo ago
    Ah ok, that makes sense. If you're curious, I put together a dev test for our developers and users to check out: https://portableapps.com/node/80118 https://portableapps.com/node/80118
- 71bw 8mo ago
  Just dropping in on a completely unrelated note to thank you for developing PortableApps - as a kid with no UAC access almost two decades ago now it helped me immensely to develop my interest in IT :-)
vetrom 8mo ago
What is Zulip's position on speech they/(you?) disagree with -- if someone is paying for non-selfhosted Zulip, are you going to delete/shutdown/dox users/operators that you politically disagree with? If say the hyprland people were using a Zulip instance and someone astroturfed/brigaded/massreported a campaign to shut them down because they didn't agree to some external code of conduct and external enforcement of such, what would Zulip's response, as a company, be?
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Moderation of self-hosted servers is entirely the responsibility of the server's owners (and perhaps hosting providers, if it's extreme enough). We have no way to know what's happening on self-hosted servers, and it's none of our business. Regardless, there is no technical mechanism through which we could block access to a self-hosted Zulip server via the web application (which is hosted by the self-hosted server itself and designed to work on both desktop and mobile devices). For Zulip Cloud, you can read https://zulip.com/policies/rules https://zulip.com/policies/rules. One of the nice things about Zulip's model is that communities that we do not want to host can just migrate to self-hosting.
teh_infallible 8mo ago
Can you get Zulip supported by OpenClaw? Zulip was my first choice communication channel.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/discussions/5163 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/discussions/5163 suggests it already has a PR. I'm told (https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/127-integrations/topic/clawdbot.2Fopenclaw/near/2367621 https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/127-integrations/topi...) that upvoting that discussion might help it get prioritized.
bdlowery 8mo ago
so instead of discord, google, meta having access to private convos... we should all switch to Zulip and have Zulip being the one with access to those convos? Or join someones self hosted instance and let them have access to those convos? I am confused.
- hiccuphippo 8mo ago
  You can host your own instance or choose someone you trust to host it. With discord, google, meta you have no options.
EGreg 8mo ago
I've been building a decentralized, open source platform at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform before it was cool. I don't think it's cool even now. I mostly got hate on HN every time I posted about it LOL. I think something about "decentralized" gets some people really riled up (maybe it's the association with crypto / blockchain?) but frankly, it's the ONLY solution to extreme centralization. Someone's got to build a platform with all the features of Discord, but make it decentralized and open source. I've spent over $1M and 10 years on it. I have to package it so that it's easy to install. But I'm working on something to take care of that, in the next few months, that will also include actually safe AI agents inside. It will look sort of like this: https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf I'm happy to welcome anyone aboard who takes the time to learn the platform, but I won't lie, it's huge. As you would expect an open source decentralized clone of Facebook / Discord to be. I just hope it's architected well enough for developers to pick it up quickly. At the very least, I think it's a lot less spaghetti than Wordpress and Joomla :) PS: In 2018 I launched something that HN hates even more... a Web3 company that released open source smart contracts at https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin . Why you ask? Because once a lot of value is at stake (whether it takes the form of money, votes, or even just community roles), it's better to have thousands of computers secure it than "just trust" the central site. When founders of famous centralized messengers criticized decentralization, I had to write this: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230 https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... And history has proven me right... their only move is "withdrawing" from a country like Sweden. Well I guess the DSA would make them withdraw from all of Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ceo_then_were_leaving_sweden_if_a_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ce... Don't forget, it's not just Discord. As of Jan 1, Texas is now requiring digital ID to download any app at all or visit many internet sites, and forcing Apple/Google to build it in "to protect the children" of course. And Utah is following suit soon too. The Supreme Court last year said that digital ID can be required by states.
- altmanaltman 8mo ago
  You need someone to rework that ecosystem.pdf file if you're serious. You spent a million dollars on this but your ecosystem pdf looks like it was created by a 12-year old trying out slides for the first time.
dheera 8mo ago
Hi Tim! (We know each other :)) I'm curious whether you feel you're actually in control to actually make policy decisions about data protection or whether you feel you could be hit any day by the "$5 wrench" by the government any time they feel it necessary. I'm starting to feel that in this environment, nothing is safe, even if encrypted and on FOSS platforms.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Hey Dheera! It's been forever. Personally, I advocate for self-hosting communications software, ideally on physical hardware that someone in your community has control over. Zulip runs great on old laptops, if you can solve the IP address problem for hosting it in your house. And if you want to be extra careful, put your chat system behind a VPN/firewall, so it's difficult to identify what software is being used externally. And if you're not going to do that, because it sounds like too much work, the next best thing is to at least pick a Cloud service where you can migrate your group to paranoid self-hosting overnight if you decide the work is now worth it. Self-hosting this way doesn't protect against all threat models. I am human and have children who I love dearly, so it's hard to rule out the possibility of my being compelled to make a malicious release. But at least the Zulip source code is entirely open and highly readable; so users would at least have a chance to notice and not upgrade. With a centralized architecture like Discord, you're entirely reliant on whisteblowers.
carabiner 8mo ago
Are we the bad guys?
xyst 8mo ago
Zulip is amazing, thanks bro.
dackdel 8mo ago
hope you get some money man. instead of just "oh you do FOSS, thank you" - fuck those guys.
pbowyer 8mo ago
Hi @tabbott I've been meaning to pass this feedback on for 5 months, and I hope it comes across in the spirit it's meant. I tried Zulip (cloud offering) with some techie/designery friends, so we should have been right at home but... the desktop app on macOS and the web app was visually unappealing and clunky, and we ended up going back to a paid Slack plan. I looked for docs on how to theme Zulip (so I could contribute), or for existing theme packs that would soften the transition but found neither. tl;dr: The functionality was good (Love the threading!) but the UI feels like the 2000s came calling. Some UI polish would go a long way.
- checkmatez 8mo ago
  My feelings as well.
bryanhogan 8mo ago
I'm really hoping for Zulip to succeed, which is why I'm even commenting. But it really needs people with UI/UX expertise. E.g. good user onboarding does not mean showing them a 2 minute video, as another comment on here mentioned.
7bit 8mo ago
Value-focused organizations mean nothing to me. They throw out their values as soon as they are in the way of financial success.
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  Having a fully open-source self-hostable product improves this significantly.
benterris 8mo ago
Also your website (https://zulip.com https://zulip.com) is so fast and snappy, I was surprised to see everything load instantly when clicking around. I have not tried the app yet, but seeing a static website like this is quite refreshing.
didntcheck 8mo ago
How well does Zulip protect users' privacy against snooping admins? I.e., does it have E2EE DMs? Unfortunately, this is a legitimate threat to be concerned about
_bobm 8mo ago
How do you see Zulip comparing to anytype, https://anytype.io/ https://anytype.io/ ?
lurk2 8mo ago
> https://zulip.com/values/ https://zulip.com/values/ Every word of this page appears as its own line on mobile.
miki123211 8mo ago
Some of the big weaknesses of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are: - Your server admin can see DMs (or at least metadata, not sure if Zulip does E2E for DMs). The same is true for centralized services in theory, but unless you're a terrorist or a person of interest to a major government, it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically. Your admin is likely part of your community and may know you personally, so the temptation is much, much higher. - If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point, and there's no way for users to reconstitute the network semi-automatically. Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to. - It's much less secure in practice, it relies on your admin to always be on guard and constantly update their server to prevent vulnerabilities, either in Zulip or in the myriad of other self-hosted services running on it. One guy in his basement that goes on vacation once a year and has family responsibilities is far more likely to make mistakes than a team of trained cybersecurity professionals. - Many Discord users are in 20+ servers. Anything that doesn't provide a one-click server joining experience (for users who already have an account on a different server) is nowhere near a Discord replacement. - People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only. - Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition, as many fraud-prevention approaches rely on the fraudster blindly guessing at what the code and ML models (do you even have ML models for this) are doing.
- alt227 8mo ago
  > it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically No, but history shows some unscrupulous staff members will always snoop, whether its just pure interest or something more nafarious like intent to sell on the black market. This makes the risk of your private data being leaked > 0, which should always be treated as a valid risk.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  > If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point This is how infrastructure works, and supposed to work, besides the point that servers "die by themselves" which of course isn't true in reality. You decrease the bus factor if this is a problem for you. > Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to If all the sysadmins at Discord died and nobody else has the keys, exactly the same problem happens. Discord though surely have multiple backups of the keys and so on, something you too can do when you have your own infrastructure, so overall that argument feels almost dishonest, since you don't compare the two accurately. > Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition What? Completely orthogonal concerns, and if your main "fraud-prevention approaches" depend on security by obscurity, I'm not sure you should even attempt to be involved in those efforts, because that's not what the rest of the industry is going by a long mile. > People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only. Actually, the further I get in your comment, the more it seems like you don't actually understand what Zulip offers nor what the parent comment is about. Music streaming on voice channels? Completely outside the scope of Zulip... ---------- I think you have to understand the comment you're replying to a bit better, before attempting to lift Discord above Zulip. They're specifically talking about Zulip as an alternative "for managing the firehose of busy communities", not as a general replacement for every single Discord "server" out there. Yet you've responded to the comment as that's what they've been doing.
TheAmazingRace 8mo ago
Hi tabbott. Thanks kindly for offering to answer questions. :) I signed up on your site just a bit ago, but I'm a bit concerned with the paid upgrade. Unlike Discord, I need to pay per user, which I find onerous and would get out of control fast for the group I run with around 100 members. Is there any plans for a flat fee model? I'm even happy to pay twice what I pay for Discord Nitro, but yeah, $8/mo per user is too expensive. If it helps at all, it's for a retro computing community group, and not for profit.
- bilkow 8mo ago
  Not affiliated with Zulip, but have you checked the "Free and discounted Zulip Cloud Standard" info on their help center? https://zulip.com/help/zulip-cloud-billing#free-and-discounted-zulip-cloud-standard https://zulip.com/help/zulip-cloud-billing#free-and-discount... Sounds like you could be eligible for free or for a significant discount. Also: "If there are any circumstances that make regular pricing unaffordable for your organization, contact sales@zulip.com to discuss your situation."
  - TheAmazingRace 8mo ago
    Thank you! I didn't see this when I was first looking into it.
LoganDark 8mo ago
I spent 7 hours or so yesterday installing Zulip. It was a huge pain; for one, it wants to own an entire server and the only supported installation method is this mega-script that clobbers everything, so I had to try to use the Docker container. Documentation on installation is scarce; other than telling you to use the script, and the fact that a docker container exists (though the GitHub repo it linked me to was no longer accurate, and I had to find the updated image name elsewhere), there's practically no information on how it works or how to use it, or what it depends on or how to configure it. - Had to use ChatGPT to help generate me a docker-compose.yml, except it forgot about memcached, set the wrong environment variables and just generally did a sloppy job. - Once it was running it was a huge pain to set up reverse proxying properly, because Zulip apparently doesn't even pay attention to proxy headers if you're talking to it on port 80, even if X-Forwarded-Proto says https. It would get stuck in an endless redirect loop trying to redirect https to https. I could only properly debug this with tcpdump. The only solution I could find was to expose port 443 of the container and then have the reverse proxy talk to that, but Zulip still won't respect X-Forwarded-For, and login emails still show the Docker network address for whatever reason. No idea how to fix this as I couldn't find documentation on how to do it for Docker; the doc for reverse proxying without Docker says to edit zulip.conf, which is impossible (or I don't know how, as again, I couldn't find documentation on any way to do it for Docker.) - Even once I could access Zulip it was a huge pain to get it to access the databases it needs, because again, I couldn't find documentation on how to do this for Docker. This was after it was a pain to figure out how to generate an org creation link because I don't think I could find documentation for that either, I had to find the script and read the source to figure it out. - Even once it could access the databases it needs, and I could get it to use the right passwords (which was annoying as it generated SOME of own secrets, but not others, and started ignoring the corresponding settings, like the email host password), I tried to set up push notifications but that required a setting I didn't know how to set because I couldn't find documentation on how to do that for Docker; I eventually figured it out but it was annoying. It was so awful and took up practically my entire day. Once I could finally get it to work, it works pretty well, but it's not an experience I would recommend until the docs start supporting this use case. I'm sure it would've been easier if I read the entire documentation, the entire source code, the entire build script of the Docker container, etc. but I just wanted something to work...
jakogut 8mo ago
As a former user of Zulip at a previous company, thank you for this software, I enjoyed using it. Maybe I'll setup a private instance for friends and family so I can enjoy it once again.

by tabbott 8mo ago

goalieca 8mo ago

> Given current events in the USA, This part absolutely isn't necessary because it's a wrong idea no matter who is in charge.

easterncalculus 8mo ago

What is the video calling and screen share experience like?

crabmusket 8mo ago
Zulip "shells out" to other apps like Zoom or Jitsi for this with a light integration in the UI.
- Firehawke 8mo ago
  I'd call that a pretty major feature omission since it means splitting things across multiple apps.
  - justincormack 8mo ago
    No different to ising Slack and Zoom which is a very common combination.
    - sumeno 8mo ago
      It is when you're talking about competing with Discord which has very good voice and streaming support
  - shimman 8mo ago
    Why is it a major feature omission? Screen sharing isn't an easily solvable problem, there aren't any good FOSS libraries out there (at least that I'm aware of). Expecting a way way way smaller team that didn't get $1billion in founding, like Discord did, is an extremely poor mindset to have. All you're proving is the need to implement a tech tax to force companies to fund FOSS at the behest of the federal government, which frankly I'm all for.
    - sumeno 8mo ago
      It's a major omission because the voice and video integration is one of Discord's killer features. Sorry that it's hard, but something that doesn't integrate those seamlessly isn't a discord alternative
      - shimman 8mo ago
        Okay, I'm sure if they got $1billion in funding they could implement the same feature but expecting a way smaller team with way less resources to have parity with such a company is just unrealistic.

areoform 8mo ago

Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without handholding?

crabmusket 8mo ago
Data point of one: in my small community group that has moved to Zulip we do have a grandma contributing. No jocks though so I can't speak to that. I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how hyperactive the UI is.
- Vinnl 8mo ago
  As a software engineer who's had to interact with Discord only a handful of times, I had no idea when other people could hear me or where I had to click to find people I was looking for.
  - crabmusket 8mo ago
    I've only rarely used it for voice, so I think I'm not in the right demographic. But I find its text/chat UI janky as hell.
tabbott 8mo ago
I'd say so, especially if you start on desktop and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video. We are satisfied with what we see with our internal usability studies with nontechnical users. Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is this one: https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ > Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate with their team leads. “Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years. I would recommend doing a little training/handholding call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true for any new app. My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a signature, like you would an email. :)

crabmusket 8mo ago

I recently moved a small community group from Slack to Zulip. Half because of the UX for infrequent visitors (topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"). And half because of your organisational values, which are more aligned with ours than are those of Salesforce. The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit. Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the Zulip team work in public is inspiring!

NooneAtAll3 8mo ago
> topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general" my experience is exact opposite
- katsudon 8mo ago
  How so? I haven’t used Zulip but am curious to hear why
  - adastra22 8mo ago
    Not the person you are replying to, but I much prefer catching up on a small number of channels, than having to click around a bunch of different individual topics. But it is a tradeoff.
    - crabmusket 8mo ago
      You don't have to click into topics. Zulip has a "channel view" which lets you see all messages in a channel, chronologically, just like Slack or Discord or IRC. That's actually the default experience when you click on a channel in the sidebar. It also has an "entire server" view if you want to see everything in one stream.
      - adastra22 8mo ago
        I see thank you!

IgorPartola 8mo ago

How does Zulip compare to Campfire and Stoat (and other FOSS) efforts? How is onboarding for non-tech people?

tabbott 8mo ago
Onboarding has a thread going here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951401. My understanding is that Campfire hasn't been actively developed for ~10 years (https://once.com/campfire/changelog https://once.com/campfire/changelog shows some minor fixes after the OSS launch; their GitHub has no 2026 commits). There are no mobile apps. It is not an actively maintained Discord alternative. Stoat is early in development. For example, https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat has 1421 commits, compared with 68K for https://github.com/zulip/zulip/ https://github.com/zulip/zulip/. I wish them luck! It's really important that we have multiple independent efforts. https://www.rocket.chat/ https://www.rocket.chat/ and https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/ are open-core military contractors these days. You'll see what I mean if you visit their websites. But like Zulip, they are full-featured team chat systems, and if the parts of their system that are OSS work for your organization, they're certainly valid options. Finally there is Matrix/Element. They have an inspiring vision and similar values to mine, and I'd recommend checking it out. Element/Matrix is built on an ambitious distributed consensus protocol with an E2EE option, which provides capabilities Zulip don't have but also adds complexity. Zulip is focused on just doing team chat really well, and does not support more than ~100K users in an instance. Hopefully will have a lot more resources now, thanks to Current Events. I wish the Element team the very best of luck! ---------------------------------------- Overall, Zulip's focus has always been on making a delightful chat experience, especially when you have multiple conversations happening at the same time. We aren't trying to build a clone, but instead the best possible experience for having lots of possibly complex conversations. So there will be some differences from what you're used to. But critically, we spend a very large amount of our time relentlessly fixing micro-interactions that annoy us or are reported to us. If you read #design, #issues, and #feedback in https://zulip.com/development-community/ https://zulip.com/development-community/, you'll get an idea of how we work. So while there's some features we don't have that are present in other products, and we don't have dozens of designers on staff to do cool end-of-year animated reports like Discord does, you can expect few bugs and a lot of interaction design polish. ----------------------------------------- The one mistake that I think a lot of folks make in evaluating options is focusing on buzzwords like E2EE without thinking through their threat model. E2EE doesn't add much practical security over self-hosting for many threat models, and it comes with significant usability trade-offs. And some current E2EE systems don't actually protect against a malicious server, say because they only protect message content, not metadata like who has access to what... just against raiding the server's disk. (For example, WhatsApp has E2EE for message content, but I expect Meta's databases know everyone who's had a conversation with me on WhatsApp and the precise timestamps and approximate lengths of every message I've sent or received on the platform. And apparently some keyboard apps send what you're typing to remote servers!).

bloqs 8mo ago

Sold

stefanka 8mo ago

Thank you! Zulip is a great project.

sleepybrett 8mo ago

Looking for your features but no voice chat, no screen sharing, no deal.

barbs 8mo ago
Looks like it has integration with Jitsi Meet https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi
- sleepybrett 8mo ago
  in slack and discord i don't need another app i just hit the huddle button (in slack) and join a voice chat room in discord. This is the problem with pitching zulip to this audience. The original thing that got gamers to switch to discord, it was their original and probably still is their primary target market, was a single login to a huge universe of voice chat rooms. Before discord gamers were setting up/renting teamspeak and ventrillo services (that were voice chat only). Hell for the first couple of years of using discord with my gaming group the only thing anyone ever posted in text was what time they were going to be on and what game they wanted to play.
  - bschwarz 8mo ago
    I would say the main thing that got people to switch to Discord was the fact that voice chat was free, paid for by VC money.
    - sleepybrett 8mo ago
      sure but also that you didn't have to pass around your teamspeak/ventrillo information to every rando you wanted to play with, less friction in discord with invite links etc
  - prmoustache 8mo ago
    I have never created an account nor logged on to use jitsi.
8mo ago

BrouteMinou 8mo ago

Why zulip instead of the good ol' IRC?

orblivion 8mo ago
It has modern features. It stores message history. It has a fairly unique feature of letting you create ad-hoc "topics" (that go under a "Channel") that make it easier to manage the flood of conversation.
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  Channels + topics >>> just channels
ThePowerOfFuet 8mo ago
1: IRC loses all messages to you while you are not connected
- 3836293648 8mo ago
  Not for years. If that is still the case for you, ask your server hosts to update to a version that supports ircv3
- theandrewbailey 8mo ago
  https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory says hi
  - d3Xt3r 8mo ago
    Know of a good IRCv3 client for Linux/Web/Android? And what are some good v3 servers these days, besides Libera?
    - theandrewbailey 8mo ago
      I've set up Ergo and KiwiIRC before, and it seemed pretty cool. I even enabled the Jitsi plugin in KiwiIRC, so it was like an indie alternative to Slack or Teams. I turned it off years ago, but if I were to do that again, I might try with UnrealIRCd.

Valk3_ 8mo ago

> Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :) Could you expand on this?

bo1024 8mo ago
Slack has basically one main hierarchy level (messages are grouped into channels) while Zulip has two, streams and topics. So you can create a stream for each project (say) and create a different topic for any given point that needs discussion about that project. Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn’t get in the way of the other threads.
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  > didn’t get in the way of the other threads But also, critically, if you want to, you can drop back to the "show me everything sequentially" view. Threads hide discussions away - which is good when you want to focus on something else, but bad when you can't remember where a discussion was.
  - folmar 8mo ago
    The killer feateure is that it's very easy to move last $x messages to another topic, so if someone writes a short note that begins a conversation everyone is free to reorganize it, and also moving messages between threads is easy and nice.
- jwiz 8mo ago
  From what I have read (not having actually used Zulip) it always sounded like the chats were threaded in the same way that mailing lists or newsgroups are threaded. How accurate is that understanding?
  - crabmusket 8mo ago

bo1024 8mo ago

What’s the state of accessibility on Zulip? (Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)

tabbott 8mo ago
You can do everything with the keyboard, and we do write everything with screenreader accessibility and colorblindness accessibility in mind. But we don't have a dedicated accessibility tester on staff, so we're reliant on people reporting issues that bother them in actual use. I should also mention there's a nice TUI app: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal, which can be helpful for some people.
- bo1024 8mo ago
  Thank you! I'd like to convince other parts of my organization to move to Zulip, this will help.

rw_grim 8mo ago

This is great to hear and ironically we (Pidgin) just decided that Zulip was going to be the next protocol we were going to add support for just barely 24 hours ago before all this Discord nonsense! https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/12 https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...

tabbott 8mo ago
Awesome, feel free to start a thread in #integrations in chat.zulip.org! We'd be happy to chat about some of the things that will make your life easier to do carefully when writing a new client. The main thing regards our double-entry API changelog system. Basically, the API documentation for individual endpoints, say https://zulip.com/api/get-user https://zulip.com/api/get-user, natively cover for each endpoint all the changes relevant for that endpoint from https://zulip.com/api/changelog https://zulip.com/api/changelog... and how to write nice code using feature level checks to support all server versions.
- rw_grim 8mo ago
  That sounds great! I literally just wrote the initial skeleton last night so there's lots of work to do so any help is greatly appreciated! I'm hoping to have something somewhat usable by the end of the month.
drzaiusx11 8mo ago
Happy to hear Pidgin is still at it after all these decades. I still fondly remember using it when it was still called Gaim and only spoke OSCAR, back when Rob was involved before he started Asterisk. I lurked on IRC back then and even made a simple TUI when libpurple first came out.

OsrsNeedsf2P 8mo ago

> Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade. You lost me there. I need to have all my contacts on Zulip. Nothing else matters to me

esseph 8mo ago
Then you're fucked, and stuck on big tech and hostile governments. If you can't convince friends to move, that is.

sgarman 8mo ago

My biggest feature use of Discord is the drop in / out voice with PTT. I couldn't quite tell if this feature exist.

dijit 8mo ago
Doesn’t exist in Zulip, theres a “camera” button that generates a jitsi link, I tried (and failed) to make it a google meet link, but it works surprisingly well, though it is a context switch.
- tabbott 8mo ago
  Yeah Google Meet doesn't have an API to just create a call; several people have tried to hook together the Calendar APIs to make a reasonable similar integration and failed. I assume this API omission is intentional on Google's part but don't understand the motivation.
  - GreenWatermelon 8mo ago
    Google workspace integrates with google meet. It's likely they don't want a competitor to google chat that uses meet infra.
gpvos 8mo ago
PTT = push to talk (at least that seems the most probable match on Wikipedia)

dijit 8mo ago

Hey, just wanted to say that I am a happy Zulip customer. I used it at my previous employer and after a month of hangringing from people- many did not desire to go back to what we had before. (though some people did say they wanted Slack for the emojis and “prettiness”). Now I started in a new position and I’ve positioned Zulip (on prem) as the only viable solution since we’re shirking SaaS as a strategic move. The people who followed me to the new place are quite glad of this, or at least thats what I am told. So, thank you, sincerely.

pixelatedindex 8mo ago
> hangringing I’m sorry to be that guy but it’s “handwringing” - twisting your hand like you wring your clothes until you agree
- crabmusket 8mo ago
  > like twisting your hand until you agree I'm also gonna be that guy - hand wringing is a stereotype of an expression of distress, not coercion. You're thinking of the idiom "twisting someone's arm".
- dwb 8mo ago
  I believe it was actually meant to be haranguing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/haranguing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/harangui...
- dijit 8mo ago
  Hey man, don't be sorry! I actually didn't know so this was a good correction! :) I think you got flagged for the "incorrect" definition, but I think you were being playful with a mnemonic to remember it- so that's not fair.
tabbott 8mo ago
Thanks so much for sharing the story!

deafpolygon 8mo ago

I don’t have any questions as of yet, but reading your site; it speaks to me and those values align with mine. Just wanted to say that I think the world could use a bit more of this.

caconym_ 8mo ago

I'm asking because I hate Matrix and actually want you to convince me: why should I accept the risk of migrating my friend group from Discord to Zulip, which has already "broken the seal" of restricting features behind a monthly fee even for self-hosted users, when I could migrate us to Matrix instead? Matrix seems like the much less risky option. I see that you have a "community" tier that's free and doesn't restrict notifications, but it's not clear to me exactly what's involved in proving that we should qualify.

ameliaquining 8mo ago
Mobile push notifications are a special case because it's literally not technically possible to self-host them. Or rather, it's possible if you build the iOS and Android apps from source and distribute them through TestFlight or an analogous Android channel, but it's not possible for the developer of an App Store or Play Store app to allow its users to point it at a different push-notification server, because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary. So if you want your self-hosted Zulip server to work with the Zulip client apps in the App Store and Play Store, you have to use Zulip's push server, and there's nothing Zulip can do to fix that. Matrix works analogously; if you use the Element app from the App Store or Play Store, then you're using Element's push notification server, even if your Matrix homeserver is self-hosted. It's possible that Element allows their server to be used gratis in situations where Zulip charges a fee, I don't know their policies or anything, but in principle Matrix still leaves you exactly as dependent on a third party's goodwill unless you make your friends install a privately distributed mobile app. Zulip IIUC does not restrict self-hosting of any feature that's technically possible to self-host.
- cyberax 8mo ago
  > because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary Nope. On iOS the flow is: 1. Generate a "push token" on the device (with the user's approval). 2. Send this token to your server. 3. Now you can send notifications to the device via this token. Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account. But it's not linked to an individual app. The situation is different on Android. Google went out of their way to make it impossible to customize `google-services.json` at runtime. So the built-in "easy" flow won't work. But notifications ultimately work using veeeeery obfuscated remote procedure calls to Google Play Services and you can run them manually. I need to do a write-up about this....

zukzuk 8mo ago

Glad to hear E2EE is coming soon, but it’s been “soon” for probably a year now. It’s a bit odd that encrypted notifications still don’t work, and I’d argue it’s a very big caveat with regard to privacy and security. Our main reason for using Zulip is that we work in a highly regulated space (healthcare) and would like to be able to safely talk about things. I suspect this sort of situation is a major motivator for Zulip adoption, so it’s weird that transit encryption was left as an afterthought.

tabbott 8mo ago
(There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications). Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0. Some important context is that we retired the old React Native mobile app this summer in favor of the new Flutter apps (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launched/ https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...), which has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the app and developer experience. But as you can imagine, the cutover and relentlessly addressing feedback after it took a lot of time for the mobile team. We've also experienced an AI slop bombardment in the last few months that has consumed a lot of time. I'll save that story for another time.
- GreenWatermelon 8mo ago
  What was wrong with React Native that caused it to be slow? How did you figure out that flutter was the reason for improved performance, rather than simply rebuilding the app with lessons learned from the old app? Put another way, given enough time, what was not possible to do with react Native and is now possible with flutter?

rustystump 8mo ago

First time hearing about this project and it feels mature. However, the landing page example of the app on web is…messy and noisy to the point i am totally lost. This is not the case for slack or discord. I think having an awesome clean first impression would do wonders to sell what younare doing.

tabbott 8mo ago
Can you give more specific feedback -- what specifically are you looking at, and what specifically do you think contributes to it being noisy?
- duskdozer 8mo ago
  Well for me it's the animations, and it doesn't seem like prefers-reduced-motion is handled anywhere. I go to some great lengths to try to eliminate animations with custom js/css, and things are still moving and changing. The logos are probably most immediately noticeable.

jhasse 8mo ago

[flagged]

zer0zzz 8mo ago
Why would you ask this?
- paulryanrogers 8mo ago
  Because X is becoming a Nazi bar.
  - zer0zzz 8mo ago
    Oh yeah

assimpleaspossi 8mo ago

>>Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be I've been putting my pants on every morning for the last several years, had breakfast, gone to work, and come home without worrying about any current events in the USA and my life seems no different than 50 years ago except I have modern gadgets. Social media is not the world. In fact, it's 10% of what the real world is like and how the real world thinks. It's why I ignore social media except for HN and one other but I only scan the headlines and rarely pop into comments like this. And I'm happy. EDIT: And the comments below are proof why you, too, should ignore all social media and why you, too, will be happier.

lostlogin 8mo ago
[flagged]
DauntingPear7 8mo ago
[flagged]
dc96 8mo ago
Fixed this for you: "I haven’t been affected, so everyone else is overreacting."
- pb7 8mo ago
  Almost no one has been affected so yes.
  - wredcoll 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
      I never liked this quote, because it makes help a matter of anticipated reciprocal help rather than simply a good thing to do. Besides, memories are short.

jsemrau 8mo ago

[flagged]

paradox460 8mo ago
Yes, but it's fashionable to blame the US for things
mr_woozy 8mo ago
[dead]

grayhatter 8mo ago

Because I have some experience with FOSS, I know you don't get the recognition that you deserve. So on behalf of everyone who's too distracted to say thank you. Thank you! Admittedly, it did take a day (less than), but once I got used to the interface Zulip provides. It's better than what I would have asked for! It's phenomenal software! The whole experience is better than anything else that exists. And everyone charging for the same features should feel embarrassed given how much better Zulip is! Genuinely, it's impressive what y'all have created. So thank you!

embedding-shape 8mo ago
Yes, hear hear! As someone who've run a couple of FOSS communities, many of them having chats via IRC, Slack, Discord, forums and more, using Zulip has always been one of the most welcome options, yet also the one that takes the longest for people to understand if they've never seen it. But it's easily worth it, as you can actually come back and read through old discussions and understand things and it isn't a mess. It's like if you could force Slack/Discord to only do threads, and the entire UI is optimizing for that specific UX. Overall pleasant experience once you get over the initial bump :)
- k12sosse 8mo ago
  This feels like you're chatting with yourself.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    I think you need to invite more people to your Zulip instance if you keep feeling like you're chatting with yourself.

31337Logic 8mo ago

Thanks so much for this!!

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

pocksuppet 8mo ago

> Given current events in the USA Don't worry - they're repealing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The one that says platforms aren't liable for what their users post. This means there will be no platforms at all very soon.

fumar 8mo ago
What is the purpose of repealing this act? Make platforms liable and thus enact more restrictions, is that right?
- LastTrain 8mo ago
  Makes selective political retribution easier.
- pbhjpbhj 8mo ago
  As you suggest, it's clearly to curtail free speech further; but in a way that their supporters can claim isn't fascist because 'it's the companies doing it not the government'. We do really need non-USA based social media, stat.
  - pocksuppet 8mo ago
    Companies already have the right to curtail space as much as they want. The government wants to force companies to ban left-wing speech.
drstewart 8mo ago
>Don't worry I'm not worried. We'll use Zulip which has values and thus takes responsibility for everything its users post, right?

minneapoliced 8mo ago

[flagged]

crabmusket 8mo ago
> enforcing the law This is like believing DOGE was about efficiency :)
voxl 8mo ago
Yes, American Hitler is in fact Hitler perhaps you're cool with: 1. Extrajudicious execution of US citizens 2. Construction of concentration camps 3. Openly saying that you'll interfere with state elections 4. Openly saying you'll take away guns and dimish gun rights Let's just be honest with ourselves. No one. And I mean no one, can support Donald Trump and be a principled decent human being, conservative or otherwise.
JuniperMesos 8mo ago
Understandable, but sometimes there isn't a better alternative that doesn't do user support via Discord. That's why it's important to have alternatives that work, so unrelated companies don't pick centralized platform chat software that happens to be convenient for their immediate needs.

8note 8mo ago

how does zulip as a technical solution solve the ultimate problems with discord and gmail and so on - EU chat control, US porn control, etc? arent you as a zulip instance owner going to have to implement all the same stuff as discord?

smelendez 8mo ago
It depends on what you’re doing with the instance, where you and your users are located, etc. If you create an invite-only Zulip chat for your pub trivia league or school parent association that’s all adults, probably not.

numbers 8mo ago

man, I want to support something like Zulip, I would even want to work on a product like this but one thing I'd say is you have to go back and study why Slack beat Hipchat and others. It's so simple in hindsight but it was the marketing and the UI/UX of Slack that made it so much easier to use. If you'd like, I have a ton of ideas and experience building UIs and would love to give you some of my input. Too much typing for a comment at the moment.

tabbott 8mo ago
You should stop by #feedback in chat.zulip.org and share your ideas! Regarding the history: Slack had very effective marketing, powered by a lot of venture capital. And HipChat was a weak product that had an embarrassing total hack, which did not leave customers with confidence that their data was safe there. Zulip is not venture-funded, so we're reliant on people sharing it with others to get the word out. As a side note, I don't think Slack could have succeeded if it launched today. Microsoft Teams has far far more users as Slack, and it's slopware. You can thank the end of anti-trust enforcement for that.
- drzaiusx11 8mo ago
  Fun fact: Shortly after MS Teams launched I created an internal "reconstituted" desktop Teams client for myself and the poor souls in my org that had MS Teams thrust upon them. It extracted resources from the (unminified!) electron app as well the js and CSS files from their web version, then repackaged it again via electron, wrapping into a standalone executable. Think like a really complicated greasemonkey/tampermonkey script. My fork at the time replaced their criminal white space use and offered a more compact and information dense alternative using CSS and JavaScript, injected all post rendering. Ah, the silly things one is capable when faced with a minor inconvenience and a wandering mind...

LastTrain 8mo ago

You are referring to yourself as an “organization”, can you define that precisely?

wellthisisgreat 8mo ago

LOVE Zulip!

VoidWhisperer 8mo ago

Based on some (admittedly very surface level) research, one spot where Zulip will still struggle to replace Discord is Voice/Video chats and Screensharing - the little I could find about voice chatting in zulip is that it has to be configured to use an external service (jitsi, zoom, etc)

tabbott 8mo ago
If you do no configuration, it'll use the public Jitsi service for video calls. So no action required unless you want a different video call provider.

sankhao 8mo ago

Thanks for your work. Moved my company from Slack to self-hosted Zulip after Salesforce unilaterally decided to transfer our account to Alibaba Cloud and the transition has been very smooth. We especially appreciate proper markdown support !

reciprocity 8mo ago
Wow what the hell, Salesforce.

scotty79 8mo ago

It's kind of weird that e2ee is kind of afterthought everywhere. If I was making a chat system I'd obviously didn't want to keep anything that the users talk about on my servers unencrypted or decryptable. Why would you? If something is supposed to be public then keep it. If not, don't. The weird "we pinky promise to try to keep it non-public for some time" is a weird idea.

wredcoll 8mo ago
It turns out e2ee in a chatroom is really, really, really difficult.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
tabbott 8mo ago
Most consumers don't know the difference between "encryption" and "end-to-end encryption". Zulip uses standard TLS encryption, where the messages are encrypted in transit, but the server has access to the messages. The server having access to the messages is extremely useful for many key features. Access control policies. Search. Markdown rendering that can make guarantees to clients about its behavior. Mobile notifications for mentions. And many more. There's options for all of these problems, but it's /hard/ and you end up having a lot of risk of nasty bugs where "all the message history become unreadable" and a lot of performance issues. This is why why end-to-end encrypted messenger apps like Signal are extremely minimal with basically no chat features, and can take a while to load long conversations ... there's a lot of expensive cryptography happening in the background. AFAIK it's not realistic to use the Signal protocol with the volume of messages people do in high-traffic Discord or Zulip communities. Some other E2EE chat systems have more features but fail to actually provide end-to-end security. (For example, the server provides the source code for the web app and can freely modify that code to steal all the messages the user can still read, or the server is still in charge of metadata like channel membership ... so a malicious server could just add a fake user to every channel). You get almost all of the security benefits of these "E2EE" chat systems by having a trusted person self-host the server, and setting a message retention policy if you want messages in certain channels to be automatically be deleted after a period of time. Our vision for Zulip is not billions of people on our Cloud service. People should own their own communities, not corporations. And in that world, usually the person who runs the community can be trusted to host it.

pcthrowaway 8mo ago

Do you know if migrating from Mattermost to Zulip is remotely possible? I had been using Mattermost because it's also (mostly) FOSS. However, they've recently been changing their released OSS edition to restrict capabilities... Unfortunately the org I maintain it for is having some issues with it now and I have metaphorical egg on my face.

tabbott 8mo ago
Yep, it's easy: https://zulip.com/help/import-from-mattermost https://zulip.com/help/import-from-mattermost.

phantomathkg 8mo ago

Self hosting could be an option, but it does not help when a country require you to identify if a user is adult or not.

fc417fc802 8mo ago
Doesn't self hosting usually exempt you? Most such regulations only apply to commercial entities above some minimum user count. While I personally strongly favor federated solutions those are of significantly more concern in this regard.
- sfn42 8mo ago
  Good luck telling a FOSS project what to do. At the very least you'd have to pay for the work and it seems to me they could claim whatever price they want.

tonymet 8mo ago

very good take. IMO "current events" goes back to The Patriot Act if not further. Aggressive digital surveillance by 3-letter-agencies has been active for 20-60 years

JohnTHaller 8mo ago

Hi Tim. For pricing, it would seem that large, public-facing, Discord-style organizations would have to go with the free plan to avoid the pricing being prohibitive. Think something like the new Limewire community on Discord which has 2 million members. Or am I missing something about what a 'user' is considered in terms of being billable or not? On a related note, I'm gonna check out Zulip for PortableApps.com. Any interest in having the Windows desktop app be portable? (We'd love to do that if we wind up using it)

tabbott 8mo ago
The advertised pricing is for workplace use where the users are on payroll; if you read the plans page carefully you'll see we have free or highly discounted pricing for other use cases, both in Cloud and self-hosted. Zulip is not designed to support 2M user accounts in a single organization. But if you enable the public access option (https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option), such that no account is required just to read content, you can end up with 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer "total accounts" that just wanted to see something once and don't actually use the server.
- JohnTHaller 8mo ago
  Ah ok, that makes sense. If you're curious, I put together a dev test for our developers and users to check out: https://portableapps.com/node/80118 https://portableapps.com/node/80118
71bw 8mo ago
Just dropping in on a completely unrelated note to thank you for developing PortableApps - as a kid with no UAC access almost two decades ago now it helped me immensely to develop my interest in IT :-)

vetrom 8mo ago

What is Zulip's position on speech they/(you?) disagree with -- if someone is paying for non-selfhosted Zulip, are you going to delete/shutdown/dox users/operators that you politically disagree with? If say the hyprland people were using a Zulip instance and someone astroturfed/brigaded/massreported a campaign to shut them down because they didn't agree to some external code of conduct and external enforcement of such, what would Zulip's response, as a company, be?

tabbott 8mo ago
Moderation of self-hosted servers is entirely the responsibility of the server's owners (and perhaps hosting providers, if it's extreme enough). We have no way to know what's happening on self-hosted servers, and it's none of our business. Regardless, there is no technical mechanism through which we could block access to a self-hosted Zulip server via the web application (which is hosted by the self-hosted server itself and designed to work on both desktop and mobile devices). For Zulip Cloud, you can read https://zulip.com/policies/rules https://zulip.com/policies/rules. One of the nice things about Zulip's model is that communities that we do not want to host can just migrate to self-hosting.

teh_infallible 8mo ago

Can you get Zulip supported by OpenClaw? Zulip was my first choice communication channel.

tabbott 8mo ago
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/discussions/5163 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/discussions/5163 suggests it already has a PR. I'm told (https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/127-integrations/topic/clawdbot.2Fopenclaw/near/2367621 https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/127-integrations/topi...) that upvoting that discussion might help it get prioritized.

bdlowery 8mo ago

so instead of discord, google, meta having access to private convos... we should all switch to Zulip and have Zulip being the one with access to those convos? Or join someones self hosted instance and let them have access to those convos? I am confused.

hiccuphippo 8mo ago
You can host your own instance or choose someone you trust to host it. With discord, google, meta you have no options.

EGreg 8mo ago

I've been building a decentralized, open source platform at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform before it was cool. I don't think it's cool even now. I mostly got hate on HN every time I posted about it LOL. I think something about "decentralized" gets some people really riled up (maybe it's the association with crypto / blockchain?) but frankly, it's the ONLY solution to extreme centralization. Someone's got to build a platform with all the features of Discord, but make it decentralized and open source. I've spent over $1M and 10 years on it. I have to package it so that it's easy to install. But I'm working on something to take care of that, in the next few months, that will also include actually safe AI agents inside. It will look sort of like this: https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf I'm happy to welcome anyone aboard who takes the time to learn the platform, but I won't lie, it's huge. As you would expect an open source decentralized clone of Facebook / Discord to be. I just hope it's architected well enough for developers to pick it up quickly. At the very least, I think it's a lot less spaghetti than Wordpress and Joomla :) PS: In 2018 I launched something that HN hates even more... a Web3 company that released open source smart contracts at https://github.com/Intercoin https://github.com/Intercoin . Why you ask? Because once a lot of value is at stake (whether it takes the form of money, votes, or even just community roles), it's better to have thousands of computers secure it than "just trust" the central site. When founders of famous centralized messengers criticized decentralization, I had to write this: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram-and-why-decentralization-matters/2230 https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... And history has proven me right... their only move is "withdrawing" from a country like Sweden. Well I guess the DSA would make them withdraw from all of Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ceo_then_were_leaving_sweden_if_a_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ce... Don't forget, it's not just Discord. As of Jan 1, Texas is now requiring digital ID to download any app at all or visit many internet sites, and forcing Apple/Google to build it in "to protect the children" of course. And Utah is following suit soon too. The Supreme Court last year said that digital ID can be required by states.

altmanaltman 8mo ago
You need someone to rework that ecosystem.pdf file if you're serious. You spent a million dollars on this but your ecosystem pdf looks like it was created by a 12-year old trying out slides for the first time.

dheera 8mo ago

Hi Tim! (We know each other :)) I'm curious whether you feel you're actually in control to actually make policy decisions about data protection or whether you feel you could be hit any day by the "$5 wrench" by the government any time they feel it necessary. I'm starting to feel that in this environment, nothing is safe, even if encrypted and on FOSS platforms.

tabbott 8mo ago
Hey Dheera! It's been forever. Personally, I advocate for self-hosting communications software, ideally on physical hardware that someone in your community has control over. Zulip runs great on old laptops, if you can solve the IP address problem for hosting it in your house. And if you want to be extra careful, put your chat system behind a VPN/firewall, so it's difficult to identify what software is being used externally. And if you're not going to do that, because it sounds like too much work, the next best thing is to at least pick a Cloud service where you can migrate your group to paranoid self-hosting overnight if you decide the work is now worth it. Self-hosting this way doesn't protect against all threat models. I am human and have children who I love dearly, so it's hard to rule out the possibility of my being compelled to make a malicious release. But at least the Zulip source code is entirely open and highly readable; so users would at least have a chance to notice and not upgrade. With a centralized architecture like Discord, you're entirely reliant on whisteblowers.

carabiner 8mo ago

Are we the bad guys?

xyst 8mo ago

Zulip is amazing, thanks bro.

dackdel 8mo ago

hope you get some money man. instead of just "oh you do FOSS, thank you" - fuck those guys.

pbowyer 8mo ago

Hi @tabbott I've been meaning to pass this feedback on for 5 months, and I hope it comes across in the spirit it's meant. I tried Zulip (cloud offering) with some techie/designery friends, so we should have been right at home but... the desktop app on macOS and the web app was visually unappealing and clunky, and we ended up going back to a paid Slack plan. I looked for docs on how to theme Zulip (so I could contribute), or for existing theme packs that would soften the transition but found neither. tl;dr: The functionality was good (Love the threading!) but the UI feels like the 2000s came calling. Some UI polish would go a long way.

checkmatez 8mo ago
My feelings as well.

bryanhogan 8mo ago

I'm really hoping for Zulip to succeed, which is why I'm even commenting. But it really needs people with UI/UX expertise. E.g. good user onboarding does not mean showing them a 2 minute video, as another comment on here mentioned.

7bit 8mo ago

Value-focused organizations mean nothing to me. They throw out their values as soon as they are in the way of financial success.

crabmusket 8mo ago
Having a fully open-source self-hostable product improves this significantly.

benterris 8mo ago

Also your website (https://zulip.com https://zulip.com) is so fast and snappy, I was surprised to see everything load instantly when clicking around. I have not tried the app yet, but seeing a static website like this is quite refreshing.

didntcheck 8mo ago

How well does Zulip protect users' privacy against snooping admins? I.e., does it have E2EE DMs? Unfortunately, this is a legitimate threat to be concerned about

_bobm 8mo ago

How do you see Zulip comparing to anytype, https://anytype.io/ https://anytype.io/ ?

lurk2 8mo ago

> https://zulip.com/values/ https://zulip.com/values/ Every word of this page appears as its own line on mobile.

miki123211 8mo ago

Some of the big weaknesses of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are: - Your server admin can see DMs (or at least metadata, not sure if Zulip does E2E for DMs). The same is true for centralized services in theory, but unless you're a terrorist or a person of interest to a major government, it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically. Your admin is likely part of your community and may know you personally, so the temptation is much, much higher. - If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point, and there's no way for users to reconstitute the network semi-automatically. Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to. - It's much less secure in practice, it relies on your admin to always be on guard and constantly update their server to prevent vulnerabilities, either in Zulip or in the myriad of other self-hosted services running on it. One guy in his basement that goes on vacation once a year and has family responsibilities is far more likely to make mistakes than a team of trained cybersecurity professionals. - Many Discord users are in 20+ servers. Anything that doesn't provide a one-click server joining experience (for users who already have an account on a different server) is nowhere near a Discord replacement. - People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only. - Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition, as many fraud-prevention approaches rely on the fraudster blindly guessing at what the code and ML models (do you even have ML models for this) are doing.

alt227 8mo ago
> it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically No, but history shows some unscrupulous staff members will always snoop, whether its just pure interest or something more nafarious like intent to sell on the black market. This makes the risk of your private data being leaked > 0, which should always be treated as a valid risk.
embedding-shape 8mo ago
> If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point This is how infrastructure works, and supposed to work, besides the point that servers "die by themselves" which of course isn't true in reality. You decrease the bus factor if this is a problem for you. > Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to If all the sysadmins at Discord died and nobody else has the keys, exactly the same problem happens. Discord though surely have multiple backups of the keys and so on, something you too can do when you have your own infrastructure, so overall that argument feels almost dishonest, since you don't compare the two accurately. > Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition What? Completely orthogonal concerns, and if your main "fraud-prevention approaches" depend on security by obscurity, I'm not sure you should even attempt to be involved in those efforts, because that's not what the rest of the industry is going by a long mile. > People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only. Actually, the further I get in your comment, the more it seems like you don't actually understand what Zulip offers nor what the parent comment is about. Music streaming on voice channels? Completely outside the scope of Zulip... ---------- I think you have to understand the comment you're replying to a bit better, before attempting to lift Discord above Zulip. They're specifically talking about Zulip as an alternative "for managing the firehose of busy communities", not as a general replacement for every single Discord "server" out there. Yet you've responded to the comment as that's what they've been doing.

TheAmazingRace 8mo ago

Hi tabbott. Thanks kindly for offering to answer questions. :) I signed up on your site just a bit ago, but I'm a bit concerned with the paid upgrade. Unlike Discord, I need to pay per user, which I find onerous and would get out of control fast for the group I run with around 100 members. Is there any plans for a flat fee model? I'm even happy to pay twice what I pay for Discord Nitro, but yeah, $8/mo per user is too expensive. If it helps at all, it's for a retro computing community group, and not for profit.

bilkow 8mo ago
Not affiliated with Zulip, but have you checked the "Free and discounted Zulip Cloud Standard" info on their help center? https://zulip.com/help/zulip-cloud-billing#free-and-discounted-zulip-cloud-standard https://zulip.com/help/zulip-cloud-billing#free-and-discount... Sounds like you could be eligible for free or for a significant discount. Also: "If there are any circumstances that make regular pricing unaffordable for your organization, contact sales@zulip.com to discuss your situation."
- TheAmazingRace 8mo ago
  Thank you! I didn't see this when I was first looking into it.

LoganDark 8mo ago

I spent 7 hours or so yesterday installing Zulip. It was a huge pain; for one, it wants to own an entire server and the only supported installation method is this mega-script that clobbers everything, so I had to try to use the Docker container. Documentation on installation is scarce; other than telling you to use the script, and the fact that a docker container exists (though the GitHub repo it linked me to was no longer accurate, and I had to find the updated image name elsewhere), there's practically no information on how it works or how to use it, or what it depends on or how to configure it. - Had to use ChatGPT to help generate me a docker-compose.yml, except it forgot about memcached, set the wrong environment variables and just generally did a sloppy job. - Once it was running it was a huge pain to set up reverse proxying properly, because Zulip apparently doesn't even pay attention to proxy headers if you're talking to it on port 80, even if X-Forwarded-Proto says https. It would get stuck in an endless redirect loop trying to redirect https to https. I could only properly debug this with tcpdump. The only solution I could find was to expose port 443 of the container and then have the reverse proxy talk to that, but Zulip still won't respect X-Forwarded-For, and login emails still show the Docker network address for whatever reason. No idea how to fix this as I couldn't find documentation on how to do it for Docker; the doc for reverse proxying without Docker says to edit zulip.conf, which is impossible (or I don't know how, as again, I couldn't find documentation on any way to do it for Docker.) - Even once I could access Zulip it was a huge pain to get it to access the databases it needs, because again, I couldn't find documentation on how to do this for Docker. This was after it was a pain to figure out how to generate an org creation link because I don't think I could find documentation for that either, I had to find the script and read the source to figure it out. - Even once it could access the databases it needs, and I could get it to use the right passwords (which was annoying as it generated SOME of own secrets, but not others, and started ignoring the corresponding settings, like the email host password), I tried to set up push notifications but that required a setting I didn't know how to set because I couldn't find documentation on how to do that for Docker; I eventually figured it out but it was annoying. It was so awful and took up practically my entire day. Once I could finally get it to work, it works pretty well, but it's not an experience I would recommend until the docs start supporting this use case. I'm sure it would've been easier if I read the entire documentation, the entire source code, the entire build script of the Docker container, etc. but I just wanted something to work...

jakogut 8mo ago

As a former user of Zulip at a previous company, thank you for this software, I enjoyed using it. Maybe I'll setup a private instance for friends and family so I can enjoy it once again.