Agreed, Zulip is by far the best chat experience I've had for when I need to get stuff done. The ease with which you can keep track of threads in it is amazing.
The feature of browse without having an account is great, it will be great for WordPress who uses Slack. I remember reading some articles about WordPress in the site WP Tavern who mentioned some sources as "announced on the WordPress Slack", with Zulip everyone will be able to link those announcements.
> It’s such a well developed and mature project. I can’t believe it’s not eating Slacks lunch.
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.
I haven't used zulip, especially at a workplace, but the thing that Slack does so much better than everything else I've tried, is search.
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)
very nice workaround with zulip — it has official exporter (zulip-archive) that creates static html of all accessible streams (and with a trivial change all PMs too). Which makes reading/searching a local operation.
I didn't know Zulip was acquired by Dropbox! Thanks for the info.
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.
That was in fact Dropbox's plan circa 2013-2014. (I worked there 2014-2017.) In fact they had email too: Mailbox, a mobile mail client with some brilliant product ideas, which marked the start of the acquisitions spree that included Zulip as well as Hackpad (which became Paper) and many small others.
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.
It's also possible I'm misremembering, but I'm about 90% certain since I remember I would do a pass through my inbox on my phone because of how quick and easy it was to sort this way.
Aha, found it[1]. This jogs my memory enough. I changed my "trash" folder to be my archive folder and could just swipe (or as the manual says "Throw the message off the side of the screen").
Looks like blog is about the diff between 6.0 and 7.0; see https://zulip.com/ for screenshots. BTW, threaded conversations (called "instances" in Zephyr https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/, which Zulip's model is inspired by) are infinitely better than anything Discord/Slack/IRC have to offer and greatly contribute to discussion culture: it is considered a faux pas to not switch an instance when conversation topic changes, so you can easily narrow in on the entirety of a conversation even if a number different conversations are happening at the same time.
Discord added threads recently which are nice but somewhat a completely different thing. It's like saying "let you and I discuss this after the meeting". But it's useful in a place where there is no structure. If the admin lets them have a long life they sometimes provide a nice archive view of solved things and such. I find zulip superior in every way except audio and video - which if we are being really honest Zulip does not actually have.
Recently spent over a day trialing and configuring Zulip to discover that opening the forum to the public doesn't mean it's indexed by search engines.
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).
Thanks for the report! It's intentional that if you're logged in that you get to the plans page showing the current plan for your organization, but the redirect for the case where you're not logged should go to the root domain.
> "The biggest news for this release is that Zulip is midway through a major visual redesign. The redesign is intended to give the app a clean, modern look, while preserving and enhancing Zulip’s highly efficient interaction design"
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).
... I hate the redesign, which probably means everybody but me will love it. Maybe I'm just old, but "clean, modern look" always seems to translate to "harder to figure out how to interact with it" for me.
The density is such that I feel its insulting to lump it in with "clean, modern", certainly. Also, is it just me, or does it evoke some Google Wave UI vibes?
I wish I didn't have to choose between Zulip's UI/UX and Matrix's federation, client availability and obvious bright future...
Font size is going to be configurable. Right now people like me zoom in 125%, while some zoom out to 90%. This a clear sign that different users interested in different information density.
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.
Zulip makes keeping track of threads a breeze, you can basically create a feed of only the topics you want to see (you mute others) and you zoom in to a single topic to read all of it, or zoom out to see it interleaved in the chronological timeline of all messages in the company. It's fantastic because you can never get lost.
I've used Zulip in the past. Very nice software. At the time (they still may), push notifications were supported for self-hosted servers. It was a joy to use the software.
I'm glad that zulip exists, though I was only mildly impressed by its threading model. The complexity of dealing with threads doesn't magically disappears with it, instead of specific discussions being organized as one-off sub-channels or as unlabeled chains of cited/related messages like on other protocols, you end up with channels followed by their seemingly infinite list of short lived topics turned clutter after a while. That does help delineate threads compared to e.g. slack (which everyone agrees is the worst in this area) but it just feels (to me) like reading more channels (because the "main" one is no loger practical as a "common"/"neutral" place).
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.
Contabo offers quite a lot of RAM for not too much money. I'd recommend putting effort into a good backup system (no fancy multi-AZ stuff that makes other server farms so expensive). The $8.50 tier comes with 8GB of RAM, which should be good enough to host 200 users based on the numbers in the setup guide. If not, the $14 plan should definitely cover you.
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 would guess that the ram requirement is because that presumes memcached, postgresql, and redis are all running co-resident with Zulip; if your setup can split those apart (because you have them sized independently, or because your "cloud" offers hosted versions of them) then I'd guess the Zulip container itself will likely get away with a lot less ram
As always, my suspicion is that you'll get better help jumping into chat.zulip.org and describing your concerns
Glad they are working on it. I've been using it recently on a couple of my projects and hugely prefer it to slack. The new user experience was a little rough on the previous version (somebody thought "stream events" was an acceptable default topic name, for example, which would show up under all of your channels) but for the most part once over the hump most people seem good with it.
Does anyone know what curves zulip uses for user keypairs? I’m wondering if it would be possible to import an existing ED25519 keypair and use it with zulip.
We're very happy to help debug that sort of thing in the Zulip development community: https://zulip.com/development-community/. Unfortunately, basically no modern team chat product provides satisfactory documentation of their data export format (E.g. Rocket.Chat is just a MongoDB database dump). I don't blame them -- all the data of your instance is a pretty complex thing to document, tends to change often, and doesn't get a ton of use to motivate investing hundreds of hours into writing and maintaining good documentation for it.
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.
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.