Zulip 9.0: Organized chat for distributed teams
blog.zulip.com
blog.zulip.com
But also that jumping in to random community, and browsing through it made sense to me, I was able to read discussions that kinda seemed interesting and skip the rest, with pretty good confidence!
Contrasting to say Discord, where I'm always overwhelmed by the number of channels in big communities, with very little way to efficiently check "whats going on lately", without just browsing through. (I'm sure sizes of communities matters here though)
Or Matrix, where everything just seems so slow and janky. Though I think it is trying to solve a harder problem being so distributed. It has real potential bringing related communities closer by having a well curated spaces that organise them neatly.
Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities – moderation, having distinctive "servers" with their own personalities but within one "service". In many ways Discord is trying to replace phpBB, and no one ran internal company comms on phpBB (I hope).
What's interesting to me is that many new companies are choosing Discord despite it clearly not being designed for internal company comms. I suspect some choose it on the basis of being "open source" companies who are trying to grow a community using their stuff, but I'm not sure how true that is in practice for most. I suspect the real reason is that most of these people starting companies already hang out in a bunch of Discord servers in their personal lives, and so there's a (small) network effect and they just default to Discord for their professional lives.
Are they? It seems to me, with their desperate focus on monetisation and gaming (didn't they try to build their app store?) that all their focus is to optimise for "engagement" and keep "gamers" using their platform 24/7
Discord has become like many companies in the space a behemoth that has conquered a niche with a decent product and now are looking to extract as much revenue from each free user. What is the last genuinely killer or novel feature that Discord has released? How are they trying to make online communities better? They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank.
Companies like Discord are lucky open-source projects do not have any high-level coordination, but operate like headless chickens, because Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.
You can now buy animated frames for your profile picture for 10 USD.
Discord is handling identity management and anti-spam. Both of those are a gigantic PITA.
Until open source gets a good answer for both of those problems, the federated solutions will always be also-rans.
I wouldn't say so. Have you used Element Messenger? The default trust policy is certainly optimised for something else. Similarly to default and encouraged synapse configuration. Not saying it's the wrong tradeoff but Matrix/Element are certainly not fundamentally putting privacy above their other goals.
We are a small team, but would probably need like 11 accounts so with self-hosting that puts up us to just about $40 a month only for the sake of getting mobile notifications. In practice most people won't be on their phones but notifications are still required for off-hours or on-the-move communications. But very low volume, like at current pricing maybe $0.5 per notification that wouldn't have been served by a desktop client.
I get it, it is a way to support development. But why does it always have to be per user? And why not keep first 10 users free, so that 11 users only pays for 1 user, 12 for 2 etc. That would mean a lot for small teams, and reflect value a ton better.
I guess with every service having a free tier means there truly can't exist a cheap offering. And the minute you go over any of the arbitrary limits you need to suddenly pay a lot.
Apparently notifications was completely free until December of last year. From completely free to $3.5 per user. It just feels weird (not saying free is sustainable, but $3.5 per user is a pretty arbitrary number).
Sorry, this rant isn't really targeted towards Zulip, but the entire industry that somehow converged on pretty much the same terms.
From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.
As a company grows it becomes the backbone but right now I might was well yell out the corridor. Only partially joking.
https://zulip.com/help/using-zulip-via-email
You get to reuse already existing filtering and what not, and everyone can keep using their email client
That said, it appears that XMPP might be workable here: eJabberd is still actively maintained, and there are mobile clients (namely, Monal for iOS and Conversations for Android) that appear to support push notifications. Given your talk of self-hosting, I feel comfortable recommending something that requires some degree of system administration investment.
I have 500-600 users on my app and have never paid. Maybe it’s different at scale?
I'll admit that I know basically nothing about how this ecosystem works in 2024, particularly as it relates to push notifications from self-hosted applications as Zulip can sometimes be.
It's not super resource-intensive if you run it yourself, but I can imagine how a "buy vs build" decision for other apps could easily lead to a $$$ monthly subscription with a specialized 3rd party.
Definitely try it out without bearing the mobile experience any mind.
Generally, Zulip is one of those tools that I'm happy to pay for even if I don't need any of the non-free features. At $40/mo, it's worth it for the multiples of time it'll save you.
Definitely try it.
It is like the olden days, where piracy of Photoshop didn't put a dent in Adobe. They got free advertising and everyone grew up learning their product. But since you could get the "best" tool for free that meant you wouldn't pay for a cheap alternative (that actually had you as their target group), completely killing an entire section of applications - they were the true victims of piracy.
I feel like that is happening with these kinds of tools. Slack et al do have free options that are completely obliterating the hope to target businesses that don't need as much.
99.9% of all the features you are paying for is pure bloat. It costs money to develop and I get that, but then I don't want it either.
i do understand the need for "charging people somehow", same as how some say their product is open source but you still have to pay per user even when its hosted on your own machines, why bother then? its not like i have "security" concerns from E2EE of facebook.
when we are talking "self hosting" then that would mean i get to self-manage but also i am not restricted by features otherwise whats the point?
look at zulip for example.
their cloud hosted version is plus version for $10/user. same for self-hosted business version at $6.67/user. So at the cost of self hosting and management and storage and administration i am only getting a discount of $3.33? again, why bother at this point?
There was a blog article from Zulip explaining this.
https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/19/self-hosting-without-comme...
Which is better backed by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660799
It’s the cost of the developers who fix bugs and keep the product moving forward. Those cost a lot more, and you need them regardless of where your instance is hosted.
Thank God! Hard to believe that it took until 9.0, but they made the right call.
Probably for "big community" things differ and make you like Zulip more? Or something else? I'm curious.
Seems like there should be deadly sins for certain fields, and one such deadly sin is for an instant messenger to change what you send to people.
> A date picker will appear once you type `<time`.
> Our next meeting is scheduled for <time:2020-05-28T13:30:00+05:30>
> A person in San Francisco will see:
> Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:00 AM.
> While someone in India will see:
> Our next meeting is scheduled for Thu, May 28 2020, 1:30 PM.
(Note that the sender opts in to this with a specific syntax; we don’t try to heuristically match anything that looks like a time.)
In the issue you linked, the root problem is that the anti-fingerprinting browser feature has the browser pretending that its preferred timezone is UTC, resulting in the user seeing all times displayed to them in UTC.
It has nothing to do with the "global times" feature -- that feature just renders an element in your message in the same timezone that it renders the timestamps.
Interesting choice to choose Flutter ... will be interesting to see if that was the right choice in the long term. I get the impression Google has more people working on Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform.
I don't know much about Kotlin Multiplatform or Compose Multiplatform. But from what I've seen, the Android group in general doesn't live up to that high standard as an open-source project. You can report bugs and might get a reply, but can't really participate in the discussion; the public bug often gets linked to a bunch of internal bugs you can't see, and the code reviews for any fix happen in private.
(I lead the Zulip mobile team, so the decision to use Flutter was primarily mine.)
everything works, all the necessary ui widgets are there. no more tinkering around with css or new css flavor of the month. layout is easy peasy.
performance is great. and best, iteration speed is awesome.
I like this project. But please stop putting dumb shit like this on the pricing page. There is no such thing.
The options are $80 a year, or $8 a month. That's it.
Although "$X per month, billed annually" has become a popular and socially acceptable way to be deceptive, it's still deceptive. There are few better ways I can think of to signal that you'd happily lie about a bunch of other stuff if it meant making slightly more money for yourself and you could continue to get by in polite society (limiting yourself to the same deceits that everyone else is engaging in).
$12 × 0.60 = $7.20
$ 5 × 0.97 = $4.85
$7.20 > $4.85
> You can't assume that someone who paid $5 for a year will keep their subscription for 12 months when there's a way to cancel after a month
> I also just don't want to give Stripe that big a cut
(It's good for the most important acknowledgements/admissions in a conversation to appear at least once when the conversation is happening, even if it does take a while.)
it doesnt say you have to prepay $80/year. why say "/month billed annually"?
what benefit does that give?
Maybe providing also year-long pricing examples of both would be even more helpful.
No one who is doing the "$X per month, billed annually" is doing it because they're trying to make it easiest for the customer. They're doing it because lower numbers on the price tag makes for more sales.
- Color.
- The organizational logic is not prominent enough, I have to be very careful to find which section is which. Color can help but UX designers should do more.
- The default chat box is too small, and it doesn't appear when you click on the channel by default.
I only participate when I need to interact with bytecodealliance, and you need to ask more people to get better feedback.
Slack is always laggy and does not even handle markdown well. Recently moved around buttons for huddles and people keep searching for where that button is. Also annoying, that pictures can only be attached to the end of a message, forcing me to reference with something like [1][2] and so on.
MS Teams: haha just joking. Of course it cannot even be considered close to an alternative!
Discord: Was good some time ago, becomes ever more bloated and heavy now.
Element: When I tried it some time ago, it was very unclear how threads actually work and they did not seem to have any visual separation from other messages, that simply came later in a channel. Basically messages know they belong to a thread, but visually you almost cannot see it. Not sure, if that is still the case.
Zulip is snappy and works well with markdown. I find it looks much cleaner than Slack and others.
I think the design issue is more of an HN meme these days, than an actual problem.
That said, I rather liked what Thunderbird and JetBrains did - let the user choose not only the fonts and stuff like that, but also the UI density that they want.
We're also planning to give a wider array of options in an upcoming release, including independently setting the line-height and the font size. It's a lot of work to get even two options to both have a reasonable layout throughout the UI, though (among other things, it involved changing a lot of hardcoded values in px to be in relative units), which is why only the two-way switch made it into this week's release.