What less expensive (or open source) alternatives (beyond Discord) are you finding effective?
What do you like or dislike about the tool you’re using?
You can run your own private server and private federation. You don't have to federate with Matrix.org, you can make your own company federation, or hobby or whatever and federate with others. It's fully encrypted and has web based, desktop client based and mobile app support from multiple different clients. Riot is the most popular and what we currently use. Has amazing VOIP integration. It'll run easily on a low-tier linode VPS.
It's about the closest thing to Discord we could find that, and it's way, way more secure.
I was never able to get this working!
It's hard to imagine a situation where a few dollars per user per month is genuinely prohibitive.
Our take is that the full price (which is similar to Slack's) is designed for when the users are full-time employees that you're paying a rich-world salary, and that in that situation it's very cheap.
Here's what we say on our pricing page: https://zulipchat.com/plans/
> Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open source projects. We also offer steep discounts (usually 85%-100%) to many non-profits, educational institutions, groups of friends, and in other scenarios where most of the users are not fulltime employees of the customer. Generally, only closed organizations that also pay their members' salaries pay full price.
Is there any solution for this that doesn't kill battery for Android, and one that works at all for iOS?
Another possibility is to not include content in the push messages and just send an "there is new content" using the official Zulip push service.
If you run a Zulip server, you can have it send mobile notifications without needing to compile the mobile apps yourself. Lots of people do that, though their motivations may be different from the grandparent's.
This does mean sending the notifications through a central notification "bouncer" service which we run, and that page of our docs explains why the way Google and Apple have designed their push-notification systems makes this necessary.
We're working on end-to-end encryption of the push notifications: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 Once that's done, that will mean that the content can't be read by the bouncer service, nor by Google or Apple en route.
(OT: The one thing I still miss on Android is the handling of the share Intent)
Here's the issue: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/117
Here's a recent (~3 weeks old) and active pull request: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/pull/4124
(There may be a kludge like the one described above for Zulip, but last I checked about a year ago, there wasn't).
It also has a free tier up to 10 users, that retains the most recent 10k messages.
Looking for more options and trying to avoid the reflexive “but discord” response or the discussion devolving into a debate about the pros and cons of Discord.