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Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

blog.zulip.org

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Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#32

Post by geofft »

pm wrote: post #30
usr1106 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Slack threads are an annoyance. They lead to missed answers and discussions, because they are rarely used in average user groups. When they are they default to private only for the writer and appear out of the natural flow for the reader. 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 surpr…

Appreciate the explanation. Is threading such a big deal that people can't live without it? I honestly never found it useful.

In busy channels in medium-sized companies, lack of threading is a huge pain: person A says "Hi, I'm trying to do X, how do I do this," person B says "Hi, I'm getting error message Y" 2 minutes later, someone shows up 5 minutes later and says "Have you tried installing this thing" and they were talking to B about solving Y but A tries to install it and use it for X and then everyone is confused and wastes time.

Slack is positioning itself as an email replacement, and to some extent all of these tools are replacing at least some email. Imagine taking 20% of your email and not having subject lines, just authors. What's the "LGTM" for? (Or worse, the sender anticipates that and says "Re @pm at 00:10, agreed" and then you get to track that down.) Or imagine taking your in-person conversations, the ones that you'd eventually want to move to IM to support distributed or remote teammates, and having a rule that you couldn't go up to someone's desk, instead every in-person conversation had to take place at this one water cooler. If multiple people wanted to talk, well, either they can have multiple conversations in front of each other, or they can wait until one conversation is done.

(Slack's implementation of threading, meanwhile, doesn't actually solve the problem that well because of the way it pushes threaded conversations to a side. Imagine email without a reply-all button - it solves some problems and creates so many others. You can and should live without Slack threading.)

... also, another argument that threading matters: you're using a threaded forum right now. Remember phpBB? Would HN be improved by switching to a phpBB-style UI? If you unindented all the comments on this page and sorted them by time, would it be a workable experience?

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#33

Post by zestyping »

It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most productive group chat" and "email threading model."

The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to find.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#35

Post by jsiepkes »

voidmain wrote: post #6

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…

Same here. We're a company with about 50 people and deal with a lot of operational chatter. The threading model of Zulip works really great for us.

Before Zulip we used XMPP for a long time, then Mattermost for a short time (the threading model in mattermost didnt work at all for us), then moved to Zulip and never looked back. I definitely recommend Zulip.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#36

Post by SXX »

rryan wrote: post #15

They offer free hosting for open source projects. It has been really great for Mixxx (floss DJ software), allowing our ~10 person distributed dev team to work together much more effectively.

That one is interesting. Any major downsides / upsides compared to slack other than limits?
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