It's a chat app that doesn't eat your life, but just provides the service of helping you to communicate. It doesn't want to interrupt your workflow. It doesn't try to connect to everything. It makes it easy to organize work conversations and doesn't wish to be the remote work coffee machine.
It seems unreal that nowadays, I find solace in a software for finally trying to help me instead of extracting value or stealing attention from me. It should be the default.
Zulip is just that: the vlc of team chat.
For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take another look and see if it’s there yet. It’s a really great community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.
It's not particularly difficult concept, but different from every other chat app. And for a large user base being confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a message" is frustrating.
Zulip should try that if they haven't already.
I find that I really like it for work. But for informal interactions (gaming etc) I like Discord better because of the voice channels. In Cliq they're "calls" and feel much more formal.
On the other hand, you’re asking people to buy into what is essentially a completely different paradigm than what they’re used to. Maybe it’s more like a loosely-structured wiki than a chat app.
I really like it, though. I feel like it deserves a lot more attention than it seems to get.
Isn't it a conceptual framework thing, though?
People have no problem putting a topic when sending emails, and they are perfectly capable of following grouped conversations, as for example in Outlook.
Maybe it would be enough to present it as "a mail application where you can also do chat on a reply thread", to create the right expectations?
I actually did open and/or add to issues on GH, and actively participated in the development Zulip instance on the issues that came up for us as a team. I found the community to be very receptive.
I just want to reiterate, for anyone coming across this thread now or later, that Zulip really is a fantastic product and open source project. The main uphill battle for us was getting non-technical people to buy in to a paradigm of effectively “filing” their messages up front. That’s not some kind of problem with, or criticism of, Zulip as a product. For messages to be in correct context, the sender needs to _put_ them there. To want to do that, it helps if they buy in to the paradigm in the first place.
“Why do I have to do this?”
“Because it makes it possible for anyone to come along later and get the whole picture.”
“Okay, that’s worth a bit of friction up-front.”
It’s really a people thing - not a Zulip thing.
Just 2c from our little team.
Best of luck and thanks for all your great work. We’ll definitely be checking it out again soon.
People get their head around MS Teams very easily and fundamentally the only difference between Zulip and Teams is that you are required to put a title/subject on your thread in Zulip as supposed to Teams where it's optional.
In Teams the value of this is clear whereas in Zulip you need to understand the goal. I've always thought that with a bit of a step back UI adjustment to Zulip things could be clearer.
https://docs.mattermost.com/deploy/mobile-hpns.html#host-you...
Push notifications work fine, the mattermost app that's already on the android and iOS stores work fine, they have done for the 3-4 years I've been using it.
??? How were you getting priced per user on a self-hosted instance?
[EDIT] Ah, you had their enterprise edition on-prem.
It's almost coincidence, though, both Zulip and Matrix became 'good enough' around the same time, and we actually tried to move to Zulip at one point, which I think hardened opinions. I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes, just not as much as I like even the possibility of a future where I can use Matrix for as much as possible.
So, who knows, maybe you'll get the best of both worlds eventually. :-)
Interestingly I think of Zulip as the fully threaded approach, and Slack/Discord etc. as the semi-threaded approach (because it's optional). The only other "fully" threaded approach I know of is MS Teams (in the Team) - each conversation is a thread (and the fact that people don't realise this is an indication of how good the UX is).
> Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines.
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 is the issue to track for the native search indexing feature.
Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like that out of the equation.
You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we started out with freemium accounts for that as well.
Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some salesperson?)
Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive thinking it is expensive.
If you don't care about devops, monitoring, uptime, and all the rest, then yes, you can run the entire company off a few beautiful snowflakes on some VM. If it goes down, you just do it again. Been there done that. But doing it properly requires a bit more effort. I shut down my last self hosted Jenkins about five years ago. Not doing that again. Just not needed anymore.
Anyway, for things like slack (which, again, we run for free), I don't see the value of self hosted.
We self host and haven't had any issues with that (pretty much zero maintenance so far). The Android app is awesome.
Searching messages sucks, and I don't know if Slack bots and apps are compatible.
Pretty much everything else is great, and we greatly prefer it to Slack and Mattermost (both of which we used before for years).