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Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

I’ve started working at a company that uses Zulip and it’s by far the best thought out UX I’ve ever worked with in a communications app. Sure there’s some polish needed but the general structure just lets me get to where I want, gives me an overview of everything going on, and generally makes me happy. I wish for more keyboard shortcuts maybe, and the mobile app needs the recent conversations view, but I’m sure they’ll get there.

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> recent conversations

I wish Zulip (and other apps) provided an inbox instead of just ephemeral notifications that disappear once a message is viewed. Lack of inbox means that I have to use unread messages as a way to manage my inbox -- because the moment I click on a notification / take a quick peek at a message there's no easy way to mark it for coming back to later.

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+100 for Zulip though; by far the sanest messaging experience for this kind of context.

There is an Inbox view which you can make a default. You can also turn on setting to not mark messages as read automatically

I just had a look. I can absolutely understand parent. I’d want an option to include read messages in the inbox, not avoid marking as read. I want a history of stuff in my inbox, the same way discord, my RSS reader, and my email client work. All those have a read and unread state, but I can still see the read ones.

You may be looking for the recent view (https://zulip.com/help/recent-conversations) which you can also set to be the default/home view for your account.

(And administrators can set it to be the default for new users in their organization, if the way your organization communicates is such that it's a better default than inbox).

I heavily use Discord for fan works stuff (I run some major annual fan works projects, like a big bang, charity fundraiser, zine, etc.).

That's how I know Discord has this feature! Top right corner has an @ and it's the "mentions", which is a list of every notification. I couldn't do all the managerial/administrative work on these projects without it.

Another feature you can use in Zulip for this workflow is starred messages; just star messages that are not done, and then you can browse the starred messages view when you've got some time to follow up on things.

Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an initial shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things'.

The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I argue that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some getting used it.

As mentioned, Slack is way more polished.

> The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I argue that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some getting used

I personally can't stand it. _However_ I just learned today that it can actually be disabled, which I would do if I was deploying a zulip instance for my team. We are all very wired towards the crackhead energy of just.. a chronological chat and a competent search.

You can just not specify a topic and write your messages in "general chat", nothing stops you from doing this.

we want topics allowed in certain channels only (ie #announcements) so that's probably what we'll use this feature for which certainly was not there when we tested maybe a year ago or so

The nice general chat UI and per-channel permissions for it were new in Zulip 11.0 last year: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/08/13/zulip-11-0-released/. So probably you tested not long before this got built.

That's new.

True, though even before this we just made a chatting topic with the name "general", that worked just fine while still letting people make other threads for long discussions.

> Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an initial shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things' [...] takes some getting used it.

I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a sibling thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960569

Curious to hear what you think.

was just chattin zulip in another thread. news to me that there is a setting for disabling topics which puts thing in a normal "chat room" style chronological order though it looks like it still retains some sort of topic visual heading which looks kind of noisy.

zulip is the most solid of the open self hosted solutions so far imo. last my team tried it sometime a year ago maybe we were super turned off at the threaded topics. my entire team hates them and anyone trying to post important stuff in topics gets ignored lol we can't help it our brains just don't want them in our lives.

but now seeing that there's a way to disable that, it's possibly time to revisit zulip

Why not have a megatopic for things that don't need their own topic?

Topics are necessary when you start having a huge Zulip server, 100+ people. There's so much noise --- dividing things by channel is too coarse.

I participate in several open source Zulip servers and it reminds me of a better IRC. It's a lot more ergonomic that Gitter or Discord.

Topics are otherwise incredibly useful even with a small number of people, if you want to carry out parallel & wide-ranging conversations on different timescales. Implicitly designing for a single topic per channel forces chats to be ephemeral and makes it very hard to have long timescale discussions.

Eg. If I'm discussing buying a house or a career change (personal) or a new business strategy for my company (work) I don't want all conversations dumped into a single river. Slack's model of threads within a channel feels too schizophrenic; Zulip's model of multiple conversations arranged loosely by theme (and accessible from the sidebar) is much better.

Catch-all topics are good for the ephemeral stream of chatter.

Some might say that chat should be only for ephemeral stuff, but then that is basically avoiding the essential complexity (of long term conversations) which must live somewhere to enforce some Procrustean simplicity on the chat platform.

My frustration with the flow, is that you’re forcing me to make a decision at a point where I don’t really know if a thought/idea/comment I want to share will rise to the level of warranting the organizational overhead of making it a “topic” vs just a little toe in the main stream.

I haven’t used Zulip in a while, but can’t you reorganize messages/topics after posting? I remember that as being one of the biggest advantages over Slack for exactly this reason (the Slack equivalent is “I wish I’d known to reply in a thread, because oops, this topic took over the channel”).

> my entire team hates them and anyone trying to post important stuff in topics gets ignored lol we can't help it our brains just don't want them in our lives.

I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a sibling thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960569

Curious to hear what you think.

> my entire team hates them

Fascinating! Can you explain why?

Replying to myself because I'm sure someone from Zulip will read this thread: I also wish for a tiered channel system. Instead of muting some, I'd like to promote some to high priority, so my inbox can toggle between the ones I really care about and a general overview.

You can "pin" channels. It puts them at the top of the sidebar as well as the inbox. You can also use a variety of filters in the inbox.

Thanks for the feedback! I think feature closest to what you're requesting is followed topics (https://zulip.com/help/follow-a-topic), which you can filter to in the inbox. Perhaps we could add an option to auto-follow topics in a specific channel to other ways of auto-following topics.

Bringing the recent conversations view for mobile is one of our main goals for next couple months!

At my work after we were bought we went from Teams to Zullip. All of us hate it. It's a joke compared to Teams. But if it works for you then I guess...

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