Element wins deal to supply half a million licences to two German states
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I'm old enough to remember the days when you could use a single client to communicate over many networks. Proprietary protocols are the reason that's not possible anymore, and I sincerely hope that every single company peddling them goes out of business.
It's not simply a chat service. You also have proxied video calls and VoIP. That in itself is far more expensive and resource heavy than decentralized hosters can do at scale.
It's not about proprietary protocols, it's that we already had decentralized solutions that cant protect it's users. Centralization is a requirement at that point if you want it to be popular and scale.
A Discord server is more or less a chat room on the Discord service.
> SaaS
that's not really a saas though.
a managed services offering maybe, but that would be a differend type of business.
The SaaS offering means that smaller organisations can also get come onboard without going to extra expense of a large scale self hosted installation.
Mattermost has no threads either. RocketChat just implemented them in v3.4. Zulip has its own concept of threads, but Zulip frightens non-dev users in my experience.
As things are now, the thread feature in Mattermost doesn't really help that much, because if you want to be really sure not to miss part of a conversation you need to keep a separate window with that channel open anyway instead of just having the thread open in the same window.
We’re very excited about it and are currently testing prototypes with the Mattermost community and some customers, with development starting soon after.
We'd love for you to join the Folded Reply Threads channel (https://community.mattermost.com/core/channels/folded-reply-...) on our community server as we share progress updates and gather feedback.
I can also confirm Mattermost has threads, which are likeable but a bit confusing.
Would you be open to sharing them in our feature proposal forum (https://mattermost.uservoice.com/forums/306457-general/sugge...) or join the Folded Reply Threads channel (https://community.mattermost.com/core/channels/folded-reply-...) on our community server?
What it look busy when fully used? Yes, but sometimes when you are working in an Enterprise environment, you need to follow something across multiple rooms or channels and this would save users a lot of clicking back and forth.
while I'm sure there are oodles of feature requests already going, this would be one that would offer a genuine feature that slack does not.
I may be mistaken, but it doesn't look hard to add it to the UI if the back already supports it. Is the feature planned for a precise date ? Does the Element team lack money ? Can we pay for this feature, instead of paying Slack e.g. 30 000€/year ? Is the lack of developers the problem ?
Invisible scroll bars keep making me miss new messages just because indicators were out of the viewport. Having the browser stall routinely causes full reloads (after a delay, making it more annoying), then the reload is invarialy interrupted by the server due to request overload. Not to mention that the reload is slow already. Long messages show up collapsed, and uncollapsing them often devours whatever text was in the input field, an especially useful feature when trying to write a thoughtful reply cross-referencing multiple posts. Email notifications send out the same message multiple times, and presents author's name the same way as the rest of the text. Constant hitting on the CPU. Confusing notion of threads and forums. I could go on - Zulip is not nice.
IRC could do it, but IRC never got a clean and prettified client that bob from accounting knows how to use properly, and finding the proper server software sucks.
* Notification emails for PMs don't include the sender in the body at all. Those that do have the sender bolded on a line by itself. So I am not sure what you're referring to here. Maybe you're using a self-hosted server running an old version? We did a total redesign of missed-message emails in 2019. * When closing the compose area, Zulip saves message content in the "drafts" feature, so one never loses partially composed work: https://zulipchat.com/help/view-and-edit-your-message-drafts. * I was able to reproduce the uncollapsing bug as https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/15808, and fixed it a couple minutes later. Thanks for the report! * The issues around CPU load, reloading and server issues are probably best discussed interactively, since I'd like to see browser profiles for your situation and understand if you're using a self-hosted server that might be underprovisioned, which seems a bit much to work out on a HN thread :)
-Zulip lead developer
- yes, this is self-hosted. I can't check the version, but I think it was recently updated
- notification emails in non-html mode don't carry over the bold, not even in the form of asterisks, so it all blends in with multiple messages
- the "drafts" feature took me a year to discover. Sadly, messages were recomposed. I think it's useful when the composing is interrupted due to external reasons, but not something to work around user action causing clears
- thanks for fixing the collapsing bug, I'll see how my opinion on the composing workflow changes
- CPU load is not that bad, but still way worse than my IRC client or a non-JS forum, so
- I may be somewhat unique in that I automatically `kill -STOP` and `kill -CONT` the browser when not using it, sometimes keeping it frozen for days at a time. That is causing the server issues. Notably, I haven't yet seen any other software or pages having problems with that.
One thing I always respect is the desire to keep improving! Kudos!
Well, 3.0 comes out tomorrow (hopefully) so your administrators may want to upgrade once it does :).
> the "drafts" feature took me a year to discover. Sadly, messages were recomposed
Yes, we're planning to add an onboarding notice the first time a draft is saved to avoid this failure mode :).
> notification emails in non-html mode don't carry over the bold, not even in the form of asterisks, so it all blends in with multiple messages
Oh, interesting. Non-HTML emails are hard to do much good with; if you have specific ideas for what we could change to make that better, let us know: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/new
- thanks for fixing the collapsing bug, I'll see how my opinion on the composing workflow changes
Happy to! We generally fix any easy bug as soon as it's reported as a general practice, since users can really tell how buggy a product is, so hopefully this will encourage you to report more :).
-Zulip lead developer
It's software with many moving parts, it uses PostgreSQL, Redis, memcached (!) and RabbitMQ (!!). That's at least two more than you'd expect. All these have completely different cluster architectures. Point in time backups isn't trivial either. This makes things like HIPAA requirements harder to implement.
The official way to install it is to run a sprawling Puppet manifest, which is dependent on a number of other tools to do the work. How do I store this in an existing configuration management system? How do I connect to existing databases? Those DBAs were hired for a reason. The documentation on that is less than ideal.
You'd better run in on the recommended Ubuntu version, any deviations will cause the above procedure to explode into a ball of mud.
There is a Docker image, but it's not stable yet, and upgrades become a bit unclear. It would also mean running all those databases inside a K8s cluster, again with their own ways of doing clusters, backup and maintenance.
The kind of organizations which needs to run things on-prem, and will glady pay for the privilege, are also the kind of organizations which have streamlined processes, sysadmins and DBAs and there Zulip isn't a great fit. It seems to be decent software otherwise with some great and unique features.
Have you tried our built-in backups tool? See https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and...
> How do I connect to existing databases?
It's straightforward in the inline configuration file, see https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/zproject/prod_set...
There's more detailed documentation available here:
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/deployment...
We only store transient cache-type state in memcached/redis/rabbitmq, but they have similar configuration options.
> How do I store this in an existing configuration management system?
Our intent is that you configure /etc/zulip using your configuration management system and then use the Zulip installer to install the Zulip software (and it'll configure the services you've configured it to manage accordingly). Our puppet rules are intentionally written to allow only running the application frontend role on a system (as we do in our own production systems).
> You'd better run in on the recommended Ubuntu version, any deviations will cause the above procedure to explode into a ball of mud.
We support all Debian releases and Ubuntu LTS releases in production (which are the only ones worth supporting given that their-non LTS releases are only supported by Ubuntu itself for a few months and thus are structurally long-lived betas). And we're working on CentOS/RHEL support.
I'd love to collaborate on how we can improve Zulip's documentation around your use case. Would you be up for stopping by chat.zulip.org to discuss specific changes?
The installation example is just an example. If script doesn't run or doesn't do what you want, it doesn't help. Perhaps the basic problem here is that you are expected to run a script to set up a complex system, with a number of dependencies on the platform repos, where you'd expect to just unpack a tarball and modify an example config to get running.
This is not completely unheard of, it used to be common with proprietary unices, but most were just a basic shar script whereas this is a series chained scripts where if the version of Puppet on your platform isn't what the script expect it's really hard to even get started. And, no, Debian is (sadly) not as big with enterprises as Red Hat and SuSE is. It might however be a mistake to tie software to a specific Linux distribution at all. Those are moving targets and work is probably better spent on other things.
I could elaborate further on software procurement if this anecdoctal evidence is of any use. Generally, there are boxes to be ticked, and things like four interlocking databases and a dump script in cron makes it hard for a DBA to answer if point in time recovery will be possible.
this. especially jailing threads into a tiny sidebar, with the bad "read status" handling going all over the place when that sidebar happens to be open.
Slack threads suck. Just keep everything in one big thread, break out disposable channels when you need them, and build proper archiving features for those. Linking to an existing channel is already there so that shouldn't be a problem.
I've found the anti-thread arguments to be pretty weak.
Like how do you store a thread to find it later—loudly announce the subject in as much detail as possible with a “SUBJECT:” index prefix? Deep link to put in your wiki and hope slack actually honors those links in a year? Is slack search usable yet?
I do appreciate E2E encryption for some narrow use cases, but it is not the end-all-be-all.
Such an arrangement is more or less what happens with key escrow, a feature which I believe at least one self hosted cloud stack offers (sorry I can't remember its name off the top of my head).
if i want to move my company from slack to element - can i have permissions at the company level (all rooms in a company) and on a per room level ?
But if you are willing to somewhat alter it, I am sure it'd end up with a overall better setup.
We do have support for org wide management in the form of the Communities feature, but we want to completely revamp it to make exactly what you are describing easier. It is the next big thing on the roadmap and I would expect it land in the next few months.
So that's a combined population of ~4,8 million, which is only about 5,7 % of Germany's total of ~ 83 million...
Element (formerly Riot), Discord, and Slack are all irc successors; Signal, Whatsapp, and Snapchat are sms/mms successors.
The differences used to be desktop vs mobile, primarily [semi]public group/community chats vs primarily private 1:1, and realtime with presence vs async. As technology has advanced, the differences have shrunk. I'd say the last real remaining difference is that the irc successors have named channels with granular permissions and static invite links, while the texting apps might have a group owner but otherwise give everyone full permissions, and people are usually added directly to the group (not invited).
In short: the texting replacements are geared towards communication with friends (ie, based on who you're talking to), while the irc replacements are geared towards communication, possibly with strangers, based on what you're talking about.
When it comes to open protocols, I think it’s a bit silly to say they’re “for” anything in particular; the protocol constrains their uses somewhat, but you can do whatever you want with them. I myself use Matrix for all of the above.
(Also, I suspect if you added chat bubbles and invite auto-acceptance to Element you’d have people arguing that of course it’s meant for small group communication! UX seems to shape expectations about these things.)