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Comment by tabob | Hacker News Reader

Well, it’s time to ditch slack. What is a good alternative that isn’t Microsoft or Google owned?

Zulip. It's Open Source, you can either pay to have it hosted or host it yourself, it has mobile apps and a web interface, it has a good API for integrations, and the conversation model feels great.

Zulip is an excellent user experience, and when deployed self-hosted is also quite secure. The only thing it doesn't have is federation, which would involve rethinking security.

I've found it very effective after deploying a local version for our team. One issue: Some users get confused over streams and topics, often posting anything in whatever was the last topic they accessed rather than going to the correct topic or starting a new one. These same users also say they can't find anything via search.

> One issue: Some users get confused over streams and topics, often posting anything in whatever was the last topic they accessed rather than going to the correct topic or starting a new one

This has been a problem ever since email: many people reply to the last mail they have from a list, sometimes changing the subject, and then get surprised when the mail is threaded under the mail they replied to.

I've seen this occasionally on Zulip instances, but a reminder and a suggestion that the topics are like email thread subjects or forum thread subjects tends to help.

Indeed, it's very much the same thing. I have brought up the similarity to email, but it's been of limited help. I'm hoping that moving posts between topics will become possible at some point, which will allow me to clean things up.

It's already possible to move posts between topics. In the menu for a post, choose to edit the topic, and once you start changing it there's an option to move just the post or move later posts in the same topic.

So it would seem - I'd not noticed that. Thanks.

Zulip's UI is pretty laggy in my experience (only used it on a big public server), can't seem to remember what I have already read sometimes and seems to only support threaded conversations (called topics by Zulip). I haven't hosted it, so I don't know how much work is self-hosting it. Still seems like a better idea than sending all of your company discussions to e.g. Microsoft, especially when you're not from the US and can be the target of industrial espionage by the US government.

Can you share what server this was (here or in chat.zulip.org)? Essentially every bit of feedback we get on performance is that Zulip is much snappier than Slack.

Given that you mention a big public server, it's likely caused by an issue specifically related to that server's scale/usage patterns, and I'd like to make sure we investigate it.

chat.fhir.org

I've been building an alternative around asynchronous audio, called heysync[0].

I can't stand being in long video meetings where everyone waits around smiling and one person talks forever. I also deeply miss the easy chats we used to have in the office, when we didn't have to schedule meetings just to talk. But I don't want to dedicate my time to sitting in a discord-like audio channel while I'm doing work.

So, heysync is the answer to my own problems. It has a similar feature set to IRC or to Slack, because I love those products, but it's built with asynchronous audio communication in mind, in a way a Slack app just couldn't provide.

You just talk, and heysync transcribes the message and stores the audio for easy playback. Your colleagues can either read or listen to what you just said. They can listen live, or later, so you can seamlessly talk even if the person you're talking to isn't there, or is multitasking.

0 - https://heysync.chat

(edit: I was downvoted pretty hard for contributing this -- if anyone wants to share why, here or via email at carss.w@gmail.com, I would love to learn how to do so better.)

Not sure about the downvotes either. Your comment doesn't read as being any more "spammy" than similar comments hocking self-made projects on HN as alternatives to existing things. This fits my use case - having a team lead that can code and speak fine but has difficulty writing intelligible sentences in English. Sounds useful for e.g. slightly-less distracting pair programming too.

I love these types of posts when they're clearly on-topic. With all respect to the author, this didn't seem close enough to the conversation at hand. A platform for asynchronous audio communication is not going to replace Slack, which is made for text messages.

If the GGP had said "I hate Zoom meetings where everyone waits around smiling and one person talks forever", the post would have made more sense to me. Or, if the GP's product can also function as a more basic Slack replacement, their post should have led with that.

Ah, interesting! I'm intrigued that it didn't come across, so thank you for the feedback. My app is fundamentally a text chat client like slack -- with markdown support, reactions, channels, DMs, and at some point threads and bots.

It just also allows you to speak via audio, and captures that audio inline with the chat, in both audio and text form, which is the key selling point. It is visually and in terms of day to day use very similar to Slack, or IRC. My desire to build heysync is literally borne out of frustration that this featureset is not possible within Slack itself, which I use daily.

https://matrix.org/

The Matrix implementation I most like: https://element.io/

It unfortunately lightyears behind being smooth UI/UX-wise. I'd love to like it but it's just atrocious to use.

If Matrix is good enough for the German Armed Forces [1], the French government [2], and the German education system [3], I can't think of any reason not to use it :)

[1] https://messenger.bwi.de/

[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...

[3] https://sifted.eu/articles/element-germany-deal/

I might be biased here as a German native that follows the German tech media a fair bit...

...but those are among the three organizations I would trust the least with such a choice.

It would be like recommending a housing strategy implemented in San Francisco, or a public transportation strategy implemented in New York.

What about Mozilla, or Wikipedia, or Fedora? They all use Matrix too :P

Be honest now, there's no way you can honestly claim that Element is a good UI/UX. I'd love it to be the other way around but it's just plain and simply bad. At least on all MacOS combos I've tried - native client as well as web app (Chrome/FF/Safari). And Android. Oh and fuck not being to have different notification schemes for desktop/mobile. I end up having mobile notifications turned off altogether.

So many inconsistencies in the UI. Almost non-existent keyboard navigation. Typing notifications and read receipts on by default (supposed to be a privacy focused chat). Handling unread messages. Lack of threads. I could go on...

I don’t know about Mozilla or Fedora, but have you ever interviewed with Wikimedia? It’s a circus of insanity. The most bizarre corporate culture ever; and the most psychotic receuiter i’ve ever come across. Whatever they choose, I choose the opposite.

We use Mattermost internally, it’s pretty good. Don’t think the mobile client is quite as good as Slacks, though.

I consider this a bonus.

(Mattermost is great)

Similarly to how people ditched GitHub when Microsoft bought it. :)

These days I have more confidence using Microsoft products than Google

Google's erratic roadmap, less than stellar enterprise support, and shady privacy practices from their ad tech side just drive me away

> Google's erratic roadmap, less than stellar enterprise support, and shady privacy practices from their ad tech side just drive me away

Tell that to Windows phone owners...

There aren't too many Windows Phone owners Microsoft needs to apologize too

Most of them were Microsoft employees

And MS paid for their phones

Even if every of the 163,000 Microsoft employee got a company sponsored phone, that's still pretty much 2 orders of magnitude below the Lumia 520 sales figure alone.

Yes. I switched fully to Gitlab.

I moved the past 3 companies I work with from GitHub to self-hosted gitlab after the Microsoft purchase.

When Microsoft bought GitHub, all of the "Developer Evangelist" / "Open Source" evangelist crowd made all of those noise about how "Microsoft is great for our community! They ARE an open source company! Everything is wine and roses!"

Blech. I can't do business with evil companies.

Anecdotal of course, but my code is no longer there. My profile still exists because I want to open issues with the tools I'm using and what not. And every once in a while, I stumble upon a project with a big disclaimer that the main repo is now on GitLab.

Discord if you still want to use someone else's service.

Rocketchat if you want full control (open source).

We use Zulip and I think it's amazing. I'm probably biased since I've been using zulip for 3 years and have always hated slack, but yes, it's a good tool.

Matrix, and you can host your own federated instance (Synapse).

IRC. I'm serious. It's free and you realize how much of the slack feature set is not productive. Yes, some different administrative challenges and not a direct substitute.

Self-host with https://rocket.chat

Discord ?

Mattermost, Element/Riot, Rocket Chat, Zulip - all of them open source.

Maybe wait till it is more than a rumor at least.

Zulip (zulip.com)

Telegram.

Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com