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Comment by zestyping | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most productive group chat" and "email threading model."

The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to find.

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We're definitely planning to provide a slick explanation on zulipchat.com. Using chat.zulip.org is helpful, especially if you visit a day later and read the message history; since you really only experience Zulip's magic properly when catching up on a bunch of unread messages (the `n` hotkey in particular is super great).

That said, https://zulipchat.com/features has a screenshot; and https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986447131421609985 does a pretty good job of explaining the concept. And https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip explains some of how Zulip's model can make a big difference in how an organization communicates.

(I'm the Zulip project leader and wrote the blog post)

That one single screenshot shows... a chat I presume? Which looks marginally worse than Slack.

I couldn't care less for any other links, because they: are on some other sites that you assume are discoverable by magic.

Now imagine a person who has used Slack, and has never seen your app in their life. They arrive at your landing page. What are the incentives for such a person to download the app? Generic marketing-speak?

Given that it's free software, it might be worth making the install instructions a little bit more visible. At least then people can whip up a VM and try it on their own. The instructions[0] look straight forward, though I haven't tried it.

Just a quick question... How difficult is it to build, install and run from source? I guess I'm slightly concerned about the "it expects to have the whole machine" in the requirements section. Is that just for your installation scripts, or are there assumptions baked into the server? (Apologies for asking without looking myself!)

Making that build process super easy (if it isn't already) might lower some barriers for the technical crowd (personally I don't like setting up VMs... maybe it's just because I'm old :-) ). Possibly you can leverage more from your free software angle.

[0] - https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.7.1/prod.html

Building one's own release is easy. Before I get into how, you should be linking to https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.8.0/prod.html for installation instructions -- that's the much simplified install instructions for the latest release.

In the Zulip development environment, you can build your own release tarball with `tools/build-release-tarball`. Or you can just clone the Git repo and run `scripts/setup/install` directly (similarly, you can use `scripts/upgrade-zulip-from-git` to upgrade to any Git ref, which is great for running a pre-release version or a small fork).

The "expects to have the whole machine" story is just that we need to configure third-party services like nginx, postgres, redis, and memcached, and it's very hard to write configuration for all of those to support Zulip that doesn't carry some risk of breaking an arbitrary third-party app that might have been installed first.

One stripped down screenshot is not enough. I need to see at least one image of your application in all of it's glory from the moment I hit the page. More is better. You can describe it all you want but if I can't actually see an image of it in action, I'm not going to be interested enough to go through the (poorly documented) install process.

That screenshot shows nothing about the threading model! If you're going to toot your horn about the fantastic, revolutionary, "world's most productive" threading model all day long, for goodness' sake show us what the threading model is, front and center.

The "world's most productive" phrase is doing you no favours, by the way; it's substance-free marketing hype. It gave a slimy first impression that I had to fight past to try to find out what Zulip was really about. Show, don't tell.

I don't understand why so many applications do this. "Try our service! But we won't show you what it looks like or give you any details at all!" No, I'm not even going to consider your software if there aren't at least a few screenshots on the frontpage. It gets especially annoying when they use stylized wireframes in place of screenshots.

Why is it so difficult to take some screenshots and put on them on the homepage and/or features page?

It's harder to sell how the magic unicorn solves all your companies problems when directly next to it a screenshot screams "It's a chat app!" maybe?

Do companies actually pay for software they can't justify ahead of time? It took me months to justify the costs of a damn password manager and explaining why sending passwords over email and our XMPP was a bad idea

Presumably you had to justify why keepass wasn't good enough?

That is actually what I had to justify the first time (about 4 years ago), which was the more difficult one. We had a giant spreadsheet in Google Sheets with all of our logins and everyone seemed okay with it. Convincing them it was insecure and needed to be moved to Keepass was a nightmare. This took a good half year to do.

The second time (about 3 years ago), I had to convince them that team management and selective sharing were necessary and that we should upgrade to a paid software. This took several months to get approval on, even though it's only like $400 a year for us; thankfully management seems to agree that it is worth the costs now.

To be fair, I don't consider myself very persuasive so it's entirely possible that I just did a really poor job of it.

I was trying to learn about it as well but gave up because how bad the homepage is, no relevant information or screenshots. I'm sticking with Slack.

Thanks for the feedback suyash. We're working on landing pages; weren't expecting a hacker news launch today :).

"Log in with GitHub" didn't work for me. GitHub asked me to authorize Zulip then nothing happened, I can't login.

You'll want to sign up first, at https://chat.zulip.org/register/.

That's what I did the first time. It keeps asking me for an email address to sign up OR sign up with Google or GitHub.

So I had something similar happen to me. I started out at the _ sign in _ page, I attempted to sign in with google, it remarked that I don't have an account and sent me to the _ sign up _ page that looked very similar to the sign in page, and from there, I was able to create an account via my google account.

It doesn't work for me with GitHub.

    1. https://chat.zulip.org/register/
    2. "Sign up with GitHub"
    3. "Authorize zulip"
    4. Got redirected to "Sign up for Zulip" (https://chat.zulip.org/complete/github/?redirect_state=...)
    5. Went to https://chat.zulip.org/ and
    6. got redirected to https://chat.zulip.org/login/
    7. "Login with GitHub"
    8. "Zulip account not found."

Can you open an issue on http://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/new? We haven't heard similar reports in the year since the GitHub auth backend was added, so I'm guessing there's something special about your account (or maybe a problematic browser extension); I'd love to debug this with you.

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/9127

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