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Comment by Charmunk | Hacker News Reader

Discord was not in consideration due to all the paywalled features and the lack of control, as well as locking bots behind admins (as hackclub is a community of programmers, we encourage all users to make their own bots to improve the community)

We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it

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> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it

This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?

Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.

I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.

[0]: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...

[1]: "User limit reduced to 250 (from 1,000)." https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...

We just evaluated zulip as well and the mobile app was extremely bare bones. Also, I liked the UX of the web but others felt it was way too technical to give to our staff (some of whom will really struggle with any kind of change).

I haven’t really decided yet though. Has anybody had a success with Zulip with nontechnical? I’m looking at mattermost now but it just seems to be a different point on the enshittification arc.

Regarding the latter sentence, that's if you treat it like a service. If you want active support as well as developers to work on it constantly, someone has to pay them. If, however, you've evaluated the product and are happy with it as-is, and consider that you're literally a community of coders if you were to want some tweaks, then there cannot be an enshittification arc because you can use the current version indefinitely under the current terms

I find it strange that people treat open source software like a free service. It's a free product, usually stating explicitly that "there is no warranty express or implied" in full caps. Any future improvements they release for free are worth celebrating, but not an entitlement they might price you out of by becoming "shit" all of a sudden

I'm plenty familiar with Open Source and do contribute as well. But I would also be paying for Zulip if we were to move the company to it.

I think you missed my meaning.. Mattermost is open core and recently removed things from their community version. Also, it's really not cheaper given the features I need, so my concern is that I'm just jumping providers to another company that'll eventually pull the same rug. I like and want to contribute to Zulip to avoid that problem but am not sure if the product experience will work for my particular non-technical users.

Zulip's product lead here. We hear from a variety of folks that they've had a good experience with onboarding to Zulip, https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ being a good example. That said, the mental model for using Zulip is a bit different from other chat apps, and I think it helps a lot to approach onboarding with intention.

Making the experience of getting started with Zulip more smooth has been an ongoing priority for the past couple of years, and we've got more in the works. If there are particular aspects of the app that felt too technical, I'd love to get the feedback.

Hi! I like Zulip a lot and the tech team took to it easily. The main concern is silly but I think my folks will be thrown by a few UX elements. For example, uploading a file drops a bunch of markdown in the message editor.. which to them looks like an error or something weird and technical. I wish for a editing mode that showed preview instead.

I don't think it's a blocker and we can help people understand it. Its just really about how much time I want to spend with them on the phone :)

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