A group of us in the Julia open source community have been trying to migrate to Zulip [1] from Slack. There's a lot of resistance from some community members, but those of us who made the switch are quite happy.<p>The topics model is fantastic, having proper markdown and LaTeX support is also killer.<p>The development team for Zulip is also really responsive and friendly. Coming from Slack, it was a breath of fresh air to be able to make an issue on their GitHub issue tracker and have fast, friendly thoughtful replies and quick action.<p>[1] <a href="https://julialang.zulipchat.com/#recent_topics" rel="nofollow">https://julialang.zulipchat.com/#recent_topics</a> if you wanna check it out
Zulip has been absolutely pivotal in our company's remote work setup. It becomes a searchable knolwledgebase as a side-effect of its threading model (the exact opposite of the pile of unorganized mess that Slack usually devolves into):<p><a href="https://monadical.com/posts/how-to-make-remote-work-part-two-zulip.html" rel="nofollow">https://monadical.com/posts/how-to-make-remote-work-part-two...</a>
I can't recommend Zulip enough. It made remote communication many times easier, it's a dream to use because it's faster than Slack (though that bar is so low you have to dig to find it) and Riot, and its keyboard navigation is second to none.<p>The mental model might take an hour or two to click, but you can think of it as Slack rooms where the only thing you can do is open new threads (can't post messages in the room itself, only in the threads).<p>I really really think everyone should try it, it's a big improvement.
Threads are one major reason I like Zulip over Slack, but speed is another. I usually have two different instances open on my browser with no problems, and one of them has dozens of conversations going on at once.<p>Zulip is also one of the only apps I put on my iPhone, and it's straightforward and unobtrusive.<p>For some reason when I use Slack, the keys feel mushy. I think they're doing so much stuff in the background that my keystrokes get delayed.
Apart from a user, I am also a contributor to the Zulip project, for the last ~7 months.<p>The community is very helpful and for getting started with open source development, I can't recommend a better place. You get really high quality code reviews, get to participate in meaningful discussions on features and the development goals of the project, and developers constantly share lots of knowledge in streams like #learning about software development, tech, git, best practices and so on.<p>Also, the documentation is very detailed and the codebase is very high quality. It's really easy to get started.<p>You can find the github org here: <a href="https://github.com/zulip" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zulip</a>
The Rust community uses Zulip heavily; I'm on it every day.<p>Before I tried it, I was a little resistant to "yet another chat platform", and I didn't know how easily the threading model would work. Once I tried it, I got used to it very quickly, and started very much enjoying it. I'd highly recommend it.<p>I also think it works well with automation; bots can create threads, and do things in response to messages in those threads.
I am looking for something to replace XMPP with our team; I wonder if Zulip could be the one. I do like the thread idea.<p>Does anyone know if there is a CLI client, and if E2E encryption is possible with Zulip? It does not seem like these are built-in, but maybe someone built these as add-ons somewhere.<p>I love XMPP, and OMEMO, but Profanity, and Conversations have some weird quirks when used together that we would rather avoid. And while we would love to just move to IRC, and WeeChat, lack of E2E encryption is a deal-breaker.
I find Zulip really promising, but lack of topic archival has always been troubling to me: <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/11154" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/11154</a><p>Aside from that, I think it's biggest potential killer feature is tight issue thread integration: <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12340" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12340</a><p>Very exciting project
I love the idea of this, but I’m trying to move my team away from synchronous communication. That tends to put us back in email, though that has its own problems. What is the asynchronous version of zulip? Forums?
We've been using Zulip for the Ponylang community for about 18 months now. It is by far our favorite tool in the "chat" category.<p>And this release addresses three of our biggest gripes.<p>We highly recommend.
I recently was in the Zulip community design stream and the topic of their UI came up.<p>I absolutely love Zulip but I’m afraid the design keeps folks from joining.<p>There was a recommendation for it to update their design to be more like Discord new light theme [1] or Twist [2].<p>Twist is the more fair comparable since they are both Thread based (like email subject line) it’s just that Twist isn’t open source.<p>[1] <a href="https://miro.medium.com/max/4050/1*iwfLW4rnn6U-mlUQpmBAfg.png" rel="nofollow">https://miro.medium.com/max/4050/1*iwfLW4rnn6U-mlUQpmBAfg.pn...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://get.twist.help/hc/article_attachments/115005750965/inbox.png" rel="nofollow">https://get.twist.help/hc/article_attachments/115005750965/i...</a>
Does Zulip have India/Asia pricing?<p>Slack has an exchange rate adjusted pricing which is much cheaper (in dollar terms) for people paying from India.
I love Zulip. Not only does work smoothly and with no bugs, it was one of the least painful installs and maintenances of any recent service I've tried to self host.<p>I've tried to get traction with it as a self hosted solution at a few orgs instead of cloud offerings, and often meet with resistance by ITS in party because of the pains of administering a lot of these products. However, one I have succeeded pushing it through the feedback has been, 'Great, it just worksout of the box. We don't have to deal with it regularly'.
I found Slack's design discussion on how they decided for single-depth threads interesting. There's a balance to strike between powerful features and usability.<p><a href="https://medium.com/slack-design/threads-in-slack-a-long-design-journey-a7c3f410ecb4" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/slack-design/threads-in-slack-a-long-desi...</a><p>Of course, people here have self-selected for favoring threads, but Slack's attention to the silent negatives is interesting and a lesson in product design.
the codebase is beatiful, however this is a nasty gem: <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/2374e25b941977e95493ebe474e9e2ae7fe050c5/zerver/models.py#L831" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/2374e25b941977e95493ebe4...</a>. if it was me, I would've broken that into at least 3 models
Made some small contributions to Zulip and I can confirm that their team (and leader) is super friendly, and it's actually relatively easy to self-host these days.<p>My personal favorite thing about Zulip is the keyboard navigation and how much muscle memory you can build moving around threads/conversations. Of course there's also the actual markdown (not some weird variant).
I remember coming across the Django part of the project a while ago and thought it was quite nice and pretty. Neither over-engineered nor under. <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/tree/master/zerver/lib" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zulip/zulip/tree/master/zerver/lib</a>
Zulip is great! We've been using it for kie.zulipchat.com (Drools, jBPM, OptaPlanner, Kogito). Quarkus team uses it too. Can't recommend it enough. Only downside so far, you can't mute private conversations. Overall great experience, though; threads really work.
Seeing as Zulip is growing ever closer to a chat/forum hybrid, I hope you’ll consider making Zulip instances browsable by guests, just like a Gitter or Discourse instance.
Unrelated question - I went to chat.zulip.com in the browser and signed up. Scrolling through the messages (pixel xl2) is incredibly laggy.<p>If I were to build a similar UI on some project, what's a good way to ensure good scrolling performance on the web?
Is Dropbox still involved with this at all?
It surprises me that Dropbox didn't integrate Zulip better, or combine it with Dropbox, Paper etc.. to create some kind of G Suite competitor.
I noticed the changed logo and favicon today. I’m not fond of it yet: I find the discontinuity in the middle of the Z crossstroke surprisingly disconcerting. At large sizes it might work out OK (though I’m not convinced, it’s still feeling unbalanced somehow), but at small sizes it <i>really</i> doesn’t work.<p>Furthermore, they’ve changed the style of the “number of unread messages” badge on the favicon so that it’s bigger and less… neat, is probably the right word, having gone for the “write the number in a normal sort of a font on a semitransparent white background and sit that atop the original favicon” rather than writing the number in what’s essentially a small bitmap font without needing the semitransparent white bit; and given that style, it looks quite terrible on a dark background, which my tab bar is. It ends up looking like the icon is just a number on some indistinct mess, with no real substance of the logo left visible, where before it was a clearly-visible small number on a clear and distinct Zulip logo. It’s unfortunately fundamentally impossible to pull off the style they’ve changed to—you <i>must</i> know whether it’s going to be matted against a dark or light colour for it to work, and the web doesn’t give you that. (I really wish it did. Sure, there are a couple of workarounds like using the (prefers-color-scheme: dark) media query to guess that the tab bar is <i>probably</i> dark, and that if that doesn’t match it’s <i>probably</i> light, but that’s still <i>wildly</i> inaccurate and insufficient. It’s a big enough deal that I’d like browser manufacturers to come up with something.)<p>In all this I do say that I’m not fond of it <i>yet</i>. It’ll doubtless feel more acceptable after a few days. But comparing my reasons for disliking it with other occasions when I’ve not liked change (either at first or forever), I don’t <i>think</i> it’s going to grow on me as much as many do.