Comment by carwyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carwyn | Hacker News Reader

I spent a fair bit of time trying out many of the different chat systems out there for our tech community. In particular I looking for solutions that could do a half decent job of combining synchronous as well as asynchronous communication. The main benefit of implementations that manage to pull this off is being able to handle real-time chat but also make it easier to catch up with the conversation history if you've been away from the conversation for a while. Other criteria I was looking for were sensible threading, mobile friendly, persistence of history and private channels. Integration with voice or video chat was a bonus.

Amongst others I tried: Mattermost, Rocket.chat, IRC(Cloud), Gitter, Discord, Slack, MS Teams, Twist, Hangouts Chat.

Two stood out, both open source (Spectrum wasn't when I started looking):

Spectrum: https://spectrum.chat/

Zulip: https://zulipchat.com/

These two along with Twist (proprietary) manage to deal with the threading and hybrid sync/async. Both the above also have exceptionally helpful people behind them.

The other special mention goes to Matrix (https://matrix.org/) and Riot (https://riot.im/) as their persistence syncing and federation work is impressive. Their threading and hence async story isn't as well developed yet though (https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2349).

Yes async<->threading is crucial, and I hope Matrix gets those. I do want to root for Matrix the most, but I think it also likely that adding federation after the fact is less likely than adding threading/async, so it's a rational not just sentimental thing to root for it.

I couldn't for the life of me understand how many people I spoke to didn't see the problem that lack of threading and async catch-up posed to linear chat systems as Slack gained in popularity. to me it felt like a forgetful, prettified IRC with awkward sign-up.

Personally I find Zulip to have the nicest implementation of "topic zooming" as it still allows for a global linear view of all activity. Spectrum feels a bit more "channelized" and a bit white-space heavy but prettier.

Zulip's mobile client has come a long way in recent months too.

The hardest part though was trying to convince the community to migrate away from other social platforms. Meetup was (still is) driving me mad with their forums/discussions features which are woeful.

heh agreed, but "a forgetful, prettified IRC" translated into normie-speak pre-Slack was "a forgetful, prettified what? Can you email me a link about it?" :)

On the purely async focused side the two standouts where Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/) and Flarum (https://flarum.org/).

Check out Talkyard if you're interested in an async + sync hybrid that takes inspiration from Discourse, HN and Slack. https://www.talkyard.io, I'm developing it.

> I spent a fair bit of time trying out many of the different chat systems out there for our tech community.

Do any of them allow you to see a list of who's online? That feature broke on Slack. I was told it's a known bug and in the issue queue, but it has already been months without a fix. There isn't a way to see who the regulars are, and the community looks somewhat dead without a way to see who is online.

Yes, Discord, IRC, Riot/Matrix and Zulip for example make this very clear. Some of the others have it but not obvious.

One thing that Spectrum has that's similar to forum software is a reputation system. Others have admin/moderator status but nothing further.

Discord's mass concurrent voice chat is very impressive, but then they did hone this in 64 man WoW raids and the like. The new screen sharing they added a while back is nice too. Interesting implementation (you can pick which of the nine to watch at any given time).

Video chat is the latest I've been looking into with Zoom starting to stand out above Hangouts and Skype, especially for one to very many and multiple speakers in turn type arrangements. Zulip can hook into Jitsi and Hangouts.

Yes, Talkyard has an online users list. It's a Q&A + HN like forum with chat hybrid oss software (both async and sync communication), https://www.talkyard.io, I'm developing it. But there's no mobile native app.

Slack has threads. I don't know why nobody knows this. And unlike Zulip they aren't mandatory, which is a bit nicer for small channels.

I think plenty of people knows Slack has threads. Threads in Slack are secondary and are mostly meant for having conversations that people don't care about. Zulip has a much superior threading model. Each and every conversation is a new thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in conversations. Once you get used to the threading model of Zulip its hard to tolerate threading model like Slack which is really inefficient and time wasting.

> Once you get used to the threading model of Zulip its hard to tolerate threading model like Slack which is really inefficient and time wasting.

This!

I got a bunch of our community to try out many of the different chat systems out there. Zulip was an interesting one as there were two points that really changed their perception of it as a platform:

1. When they were told there was a "Night Mode" - aesthetics are important! (something Slack arguably got right, IMHO beyond that it's just fancy IRC).

2. After around 5-10 minutes of playing around the penny drops as to why the stream and topic "zooming" is implemented in the way is it. Usually a "Holy Cow" moment.

Once you "get" it, going back to anything else feels like going back in time.

IME, it is awkward to revisit collapsed threads in Slack; especially after the thread has aged a few hours.

This is exactly the issue with the style of threads used in Slack, Teams, Hangouts Chat etc. Their useful half-life tends to them being forgotten quickly.

Topics aren't mandatory in Zulip. You can enable the "no topic" thread which makes them effectively optional.

Yes Slack has threads, but they aren't implemented in a way that's conducive to ad-hoc interaction over longer periods of time.

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