11–20 of 153 posts
P.S: I'm trying to create a community for "Bored Hackers", and you can check it out here and say hi! (https://spectrum.chat/boredhackers)
I was really interested in this. The first intriguing thing I found was this product is owned by Dropbox. Slack eating into Dropbox's territory with (decent) file sharing / searching and Dropbox countering with a alternative chat/ threading app is a nice battle.
Zulip was started as, and basically still was last I used it, a modernization/web-ification of the BarnOwl[1] curses/terminal client for, mostly, MIT's (and CMU's, inter alia [2]) legacy Zephyr[3] IM protocol. (though BarnOwl also has support for XMPP, IRC, AIM, and Twitter). MIT students who were into the zephyr community also tended to like the interleaved-thread with option to narrow to specific filters view. The Subject part of threading comes as largely an accident of Zephyr's implementation[4]
Zulip was acquired by Dropbox in 2014: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-s...
and subsequently open sourced in 2015. Zulipchat.com is a second company formed around Zulip by (OP) one of the original founding members of the pre-acquisition company to (I'm speculating) keep the project healthy and active and give people a hosted option. It is not primarily aggressively pursuing market share, capitalization, etc. That is why it doesn't like price aggressively to compete with Slack, etc. as someone EIT was confused about
I took the time to spin this out from memory, etc. but then I found it was mostly covered (or if you prefer corroborated) here: https://zulipchat.com/history/
Anyway its a good model for organized communications once you get used to it and I'd recommend it if you are in a small enough company/team with enough latitude to experiment with such. It would also be cool to see a decent large public instance as an alternative to ~Mastadon
[2] https://www.quora.com/Where-are-some-places-the-Zephyr-messa...)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)
[4] https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node...
I was really interested in this. The first intriguing thing I found was this product is owned by Dropbox. Slack eating into Dropbox's territory with (decent) file sharing / searching and Dropbox countering with a alternative chat/ threading app is a nice battle.
How is threading done right exactly as compared to Slack (I don't use threading)?
Zulip's threading is based, more like email, on a Subject which all messages (can) have. Though Zulip subjects are more likely to be one or two words.
In this way threading is tacked on to Slack whereas it is as at the heart of Zulip
We used Zulip (then a commercial product) at FoundationDB, and really liked it. We had teams in two cities. The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about. But IMO the killer feature is the "all messages" view that merges chosen streams in mo…
Off topic, but man I wish FoundationDB hadn't disappeared.
Me too.
Back on topic, I really enjoyed Zulip as well. It wasn't perfect, but it very much did feel like they were actually getting the marriage of email and chat closer to right. Slack just feels like a shitty chat client that uses all of my RAM.
need more screenshots. I want to see exactly where it have done right instead of downloading few megabytes of an electron app.
How is threading done right exactly as compared to Slack (I don't use threading)?
In zulip every message belongs to a topic. (Well there is the "no topic" topic, but it shouldn't be used and even if it is it appears exactly like every other topic). So no surprises.
I have used slack (and irc and xmpp) for a long time, and Zulip for 2 months. Zulip is certainly much better for the geek.
Slack user experience is somewhat more straight forward for the naive user not caring about things done "right".
For hacker news readers zulip is likely to be the preferred choice. Expect resistence from your non hacker news colleagues / managers / team members.
How is threading done right exactly as compared to Slack (I don't use threading)?
Very differently. Slack does threading on the basis of replies to a message and hides/collapses those under a thread, showing them only to people who expand and notifying only those who are already involved in the thread (by replying to it or being OP) Zulip's threading is based, more like email, on a Subject which all messages (can) have. Though Zulip subjects are more likely to be one or two words. In this way thre…