Seriously, it's hard to express this experience until you've tried it. If you look at their feature lists, you can't appreciate the craft and love and thought put into Zulip that makes it stand out from other chat systems.
And you may live in the chat systems with your distributed teams all day.
I'd like to know what the others are.
except without requiring years to master
> I received over 20,000 messages in chat.zulip.org during my paternity leave. I really enjoyed reading everything and replying to the hundreds of topics where I had something to contribute or someone to thank. Systematically reading months of history would have been impossible with any other tool!
I don't think most people need to read everything they receive, but in my role as the project leader of a large open source community, essentially every conversation in chat.zulip.org is potentially relevant for me, so skimming every conversation is useful.
The critical thing here, both in my daily work and coming back from time away, is that Zulip makes skimming really cheap (`n` to jump to next topic, then read a moment and then hit `End` if it seems likely that the thread is resolved to check the conclusion, and then repeat). So a 150-message thread debugging something takes like 30 seconds -- read the first post (maybe a bug report), note who was helping investigate, jump to send and see that the topic ends with a PR link or other resolution.
At the same time, Zulip's organization means I could find the dozen of threads that might be a short thread presenting a question or problem that I'm our main expert on. In these cases, I can read the thread carefully, and send a reply resurrecting the thread (2 months later) with answer that was missing, some added context/background, or a link to a PR I made to put the answer in our documentation (my preferred solution to unanswered questions).
This has the effect of unblocking a bunch of useful work that had been waiting for me to return, and also giving me good context on everything I missed.
It's also pretty fun to see all the great that folks did while I was away :)
Essentially everyone has miniature versions of the catch-up problem:
* Fulltime employees coming back from a normal 1-2 week vacation. * Anyone working closely with collaborators in other time zones (I wake up every morning to a couple hundred new messages in chat.zulip.org sent by our international community members). * Any leader who spends a lot of time in meetings and wants to focus on the meeting and then batch-process communications afterwards. * Any engineer who wants to be able to spend a whole or half day focusing on a really difficult problem and catch up on conversations afterwards. * Anyone who's a part-time participant in an open community, whether they just check it once a day, one a week, or once a month. A user in this situation really wants to skim everything that happened and find what's interesting to them, not read the last few hours' traffic, which is what the Slack/Discord/Teams model forces you to do.
The same technique core works for all of these cases: pick your favorite streams and read them with `n` as I described above, then perhaps browse the list of topics in several more and click into just the topics that interest you and then mark the rest (if any) as read.
All IRC-inspired chat tools are a really rough experience for part-time participants -- they just don't have a way to let you prioritize reading interesting conversations. We discuss this issue at length and its consequences for inclusivity of the communities that use them in https://zulip.com/for/open-source/. (It's framed around inclusivity in open source, but the Slack channel model also can exclude leaders who spend most of their time in meetings)
(As a sidenote, being able to do this is why Zulip pushes users to have every conversation in a topic, rather than "threading" being a side feature used for 10% messages like some other tools do.)
It stopped the broken conversations, but it didn't make anyone use MS Teams any more than necessary. (Our group has been using Slack for longer than Teams has been around, and since Teams is still inferior in nearly every way we haven't switched; due to the near silence from every other org in the company, they're probably doing the same).
[1] https://stitchdx.com/blog/microsoft-teams-new-conversation-b...
We moved to teams from zooms ephemeral chats, and I have to say it's nicer in teams with all of the integrations and file storage.
We get basically perfect usage of the conversation system at work (an engineering org), and so I've always thought that the MS implementation was the best. It has almost all of the organisation positives of Zulip threading without forcing you to name every single thread, and with none of the onboarding pain. We also have 'New Conversation' as a button as suggested by a sibling comment, so maybe that's the key.
I find it interesting that we both had fairly self-centred views on how much the conversation system was used. Don't forget that MS have the actual data!
Discord's reply function is basically exactly what I want- It takes up no extra space, the message being replied to is not removed from its original context, and the reply shows a preview and lets you easily jump back to the original context.