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Comment by wnolens | Hacker News Reader

Given the 'tour', it's slack with named threads (that can be pinned).

I like that feature. But it seems a pretty small thing. What are the other things that stand out about it? other than being open source.

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As someone who has used Zulip for years, I consider the named threads to be the reason to use Zulip. When used properly, it makes following discussions actually possible without being drowned by other concurrent messages. I'd say Discord is superior in many other ways, but for me this one killer feature still makes me prefer Zulip for work.

Strongly agree. My small, fully remote startup uses it, and this is the big reason we switched away from slack. The name threads are simply terrific for making it a better way to manage communication.

It's not a small thing, it's a huge thing. The way the entire UI is structured around this one difference is great, and makes for a completely different (and much, much better) experience.

Cool. I guess I was wondering if it's so good, slack could build it in a single 2 week sprint (or a third party could just build a slack app/plugin). Creating a near-clone of a well-funded product to tweak one thing is existentially risky, but it sounds like Zulip has actually been around quite a while.

No, for Slack to be as good as Zulip it'd have to basically be rewritten from scratch. Just the speed of the UI means a complete rewrite of the frontend, and Zulip's UX is its strong suit.

For one, Zulip is a year older than Slack.

However, it is still has a ton of bridges and other integrations, and all the shiny things you'd expect from Slack.

The thread-first model is quite different from the free-for-all channel model in IRC/Slack. Imagine the chaos in your email inbox if messages didn't have subject lines or threads. Zulip makes it actually feasible to follow a chat conversation asynchronously, and it's much easier to manage how many notifications you get.

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