Zulip 7.0: Threaded open-source team chat
blog.zulip.com
blog.zulip.com
With their (somewhat new) public server feature, the chat is available for browsing without needing an account first.
I strongly urge any open source project using Discord or Slack as their chat, to give Zulip a real shot.
No screenshots for new readers to actually see what's the UI look like, what's the UX look like, what's other feature look like VISUALLY.
Why taking too much words ? Remember one golden rule in marketing: One picture worths 1000 words.
Zulip was acquired by Dropbox before it was publicly available, and then after a few years Dropbox spun it out into an independent OSS project.
It's kind of unfortunate that Dropbox never really gave Zulip a chance, because that was just before Slack became successful. Zulip as a product is way better than Slack and could have either "won" or influenced Slack and competitors to adopt a better conversation model.
Of course, nothing is stopping that from happening today, but by the time Zulip was refounded and regained momentum, several critical years had passed in between and Slack was much further ahead in market share.
Having used Zulip, Slack is now literally painful to use, especially at scale.
How is Zulip for search for large orgs with millions of messages? Discord doesn't hold a candle to Slack.
For context, I'm not talking just about the ease and speed of searches, but also about the support for basic filters, exact phrase searching (Discord doesn't have this) or bypassing fuzzy search (Discord always fuzzy searches on the individual words of your search words)
Just tried it on https://chat.zulip.org:
So far, it seems it doesn't support exact phrase search: Searching for "what" with our without quotes produces no results. Slack finds the results.
Searching for `"option"` in quotes also finds `options`, so I'm not sure if exact, non-fuzzy search is possible.
https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages suggests that there is no support for exact-search or case-sensitive search.
Until some other team chat offers a good search, there's no way I'd consider anything besides Slack if it's up to me.
It's interesting to imagine a timeline where Dropbox becomes a leading business/collaboration tool, similar to GSuite or MS Office. It seems like they had many of the right pieces, between storage, paper, zulip... If they had added email and calendar plus potentially their own presentation and spreadsheet tools they could be have been a contender instead of relegated to pretty just storage at this point.
It didn't work out. Some of the reasons are in this Casey Newton article: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...
My perception in 2014 was right in line with the way it's told in that 2015 article: that this was a new and clever UI twist, one that I hadn't seen before and that many people in the industry were copying after seeing it in Mailbox. That was as an engineer in San Francisco, talking with designers and product folks and people much more plugged in to industry gossip than me - so I think that means it truly had not previously existed in the mobile apps (really, the iPhone apps) that people here who were connected were paying attention to.
It sounds like Palm had the feature years earlier. Maybe the Mailbox folks got the idea from there! In any case I think they did succeed in bringing the feature to a lot more users, by making it something that people in the industry widely knew about and copied.
If your community content isn't indexed then in many cases it might as well not exist. The open web is based on linking and indexing (Google's current search monopoly aside)
We will eventually support search engine indexing without the extra overhead of running a separate archive tool (likely as an organization-level settings checkbox, since not everyone who wants public access wants search engine indexing).
go to say https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/login/ and scroll down to the footer. Footer links are relative and seems to not work for at least https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/plans/ - sends to https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/accounts/login/?next=/p...
The design of Zulip is often talked about.
They are making it a major focus to improve.
You can see the redesign at the link below (no account needed).
It wouldn’t characterize it as “clean, modern look” even though the blog calls it that.
It’s say it’s much more accessible / clear.
I wish I didn't have to choose between Zulip's UI/UX and Matrix's federation, client availability and obvious bright future...
We use Mattermost. Its great, but you really get lost in topics quickly and its hard to follow them. Especially with bots that you can't remove from conversation when you need it. We also had to mumbo jumbo LDAP support via GitLab which is suboptimal and there seems to be no way to remove users forever from it, only deactivate them.
The threads here look very nice and entire thing reminds on forum/email conversation. With free LDAP and AIM support I am certainly going to take a deep look.
I think I'm just old school and prefer the raw simplicity of things like IRC where there is no assumption of threading: you'd just go about quoting exactly what you want to respond to, which is just enough context to connect the dots. IMHO there's no silver bullet: all the alternatives have their pros and cons and there's universal value in simplicity.
I've looked at cloud vm offerings but they all seem fairly steep for the Zulip hardware requirements (especially the RAM).
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/requiremen...
As always, my suspicion is that you'll get better help jumping into chat.zulip.org and describing your concerns
Hetzner is also a popular source of cheap servers. You'll see similar prices there, though they're often a bit higher (but with more options).
If you're a real cheapskate, you can try using Oracle's always-free tier. That'll get you 4 ARM cores with about 6GB of RAM each for a total of 24GB if you combine them into one machine. Downside of the free tier: the connection is capped at 50mbps which may become a problem for 200 people.
I hope
> we’ve started a prototype of a next-generation Zulip mobile app in Flutter
means that the same will happen to the mobile app - it's badly in need of a UI reboot.
But it does mean the quality of import tools is limited by how many people have run it and reported all the issues they ran into so that we can fix them. It is not uncommon for our data import tools to need to work around things that are essentially data corruption in the original database.
Our Rocket.Chat import tool was indeed improved greatly in 6.0 last November thanks to a user with a very large and old Rocket.Chat instance submitting a very helpful pull request last Fall, so you may have better luck if you try again now.
It’s not like in a forum where you create a topic and then get answers (although you can).
It’s more like a chat conversation that you can group and label once you detect it have its own topic.