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Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

The carousel on the main page is very easily understandable, which is great!

The whole topics (sub-channels, basically) idea seems interesting as well, though personally the solution itself seems pretty similar to two other great pieces of software out there:

  - Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ (the Jitsi integration was especially nice)
  - Mattermost https://mattermost.com/ (really simple to setup)

Both of those also seemed serviceable, decently familiar and usable. I guess even Nextcloud Talk could work if that suits your environment better https://nextcloud.com/talk/ though personally it felt a little more barebones in comparison.

Has anyone extensively used any of them and can share what details/differences jumped out at them? Admittedly, i probably missed most of those myself and just saw them as similar, self-hostable chat solutions.

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I haven't used Rocket.Chat, but I've used the other two:

Threading feels bolted on in Mattermost, but is the primary feature of zulip.

Think of Zulip as a realtime version of NNTP, and Mattermost as a more modern IRC with a "reply" feature. The "right" way to use Zulip and Mattermost is quite different, though each one can be easily used as an inferior version of the other.

Disclaimer: PM at Mattermost

We of course use our own product every day and when I first joined the company in 2019 I also found that threading felt "bolted on". Primarily because channels rendered everything in the same linear feed regardless if it was a message or comment so there wasn't much point in taking the time to first hit reply.

However, Collapsed Reply Thread [0] has been a game changer for me and not only do I no longer feel that way about threading, my productivity would plunge without it. That feature has been in public beta since last summer [1] and will go into general availability in two weeks to officially become the "right" way to use Mattermost. Not to say that it's the same as Zulip, just sharing an updated perspective.

[0] https://docs.mattermost.com/channels/organize-conversations....

[1] https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-beta/

I've tried moving my teams to mattermost now twice and always we ran into the issue that integration for live meetings was painful. Neither zoom nor Google meets was possible to set up in an easy to use manner so everybody could jump on a call when needed

That suck and I'm sorry to hear that. We're releasing public beta for built-in calling functionality on June 15 for both cloud and self-hosted offerings, you could give it a try to see if it meets your needs.

I'd also still like to help you setup tools that your team already use if it's still relevant. Please talk to us in the ~Ask R&D channel on our community instance: https://community.mattermost.com/core/channels/ask-r-and-d

Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are both open core. Zulip is really 100% FOSS.

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