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Comment by EMIRELADERO | Hacker News Reader

Your product sounds extremely great! I'm hooked!

One nitpick: In my humble opinon, you should switch from Discord chat to Zulip.

It's completely open-source (Apache 2, self-hostable, free full cloud plan for open-source projects) and has an excellent threads-first (called "topics" model): https://zulip.com/why-zulip/

It can run fully in the browser, but it has desktop and mobile clients as well.

It also supports public channels which AFAIK discord doesn't. So you can link to specific messages inside a GitHub issue and anyone who doesn't even have an account can see the relevant messages and context.

Interestingly it's what the Rust language team (and community) uses for comms: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com

(I'm not affiliated in any way with Zulip btw, I just love the product)

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I'm very tempted and agree that Zulip sounds much better than Discord. The only thing I'm a little bit worried about is that I have noticed that most people hate having multiple chat clients open and that discord seem to be the de factor standards for open source projects. I apologize to be contributing to the network effect and will strongly consider switching to Zulip.

That's a great response, thank you!

As a sidenote: is the windmill hub open-source too? Does it make use of the base product to operate? I think it might be a good candidate for showing what your product is capable of, as an actual example of use in production

Windmill Hub is not open-source, not because we want to keep it private but because I wrote it a bit quickly using svelte kit and it's not ready for the world to see yet. It does not use windmill to operate but every actions trigger a windmill webhook and alert the discord.

Got it. Thanks!

https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ is a good ~applied-zulip example in OSS.

I would suggest against it, Discord is the de facto standard, especially with the younger crowd, millennials and Gen Z. Everyone already has it installed and everyone knows exactly how it works, and it also "just works". I've never even heard of Zulip and I hang out on HN almost every day.

Just because everyone knows how it works doesn't mean alternatives shouldn't be tried, especially when they're superior in the aspects that matter for the audience you're interested in.

Besides, how do you think a competing product should rise then?

I'm not trying to start an argument here, but I consider less friction and more familiarity to be superior for this use case.

I was trying to provide a contrary opinion because I often see the HN hivemind hate on Discord heavily for no reason, while it's become a ubiquitous piece of software used by younger people that the older generations have been completely sleeping on and still think it's some niche version of IRC for gamers. Discord has hundreds of millions of users, it's a behemoth rivaling the big social networks.

As a random user, if I were trying to ask a question about this piece of software, I want to open the Discord server and ask it, I don't want to start researching whatever Zulip is and how to use it and figuring out how a new interface works

It it against the Discord Terms of Service to extend the accessibility of the client past what is available in web standards (and what of that they implement). The regularly ban accounts of people who try to make it more accessible (and often of the users too).

These might be good qualities for a gamer guild or YouTuber community, but it's a real barrier to participating in open source software communities.

Zulip is open, and doesn't have these restrictions (and already had many bridges and accessibility integrations). I participated in the Oil Zulip, and it was less of a hassle tHan to join a new Discord guild and navigating their adhoc rules bots.

Discourse[0] is a perfect fit for Windmill, IMO. Maybe I'm biased because I don't like Discord for this kind of project. Let the search engines leverage your project.

[0] https://www.discourse.org

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