Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat • Hacker News Board

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#41

Post by isbjorn16 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #27

isbjorn16 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the primary reason to use Zulip. In this way, Zulip is more of a Teams competitor than it is a Slack competitor. I, frankly, cannot stand threads. I want a chat room, not a realtime forum. I understand why people would like that, but it still bothers the shit out of me. I work for MS so we have to use Teams, but I'd prefer opt-in to threads vs. threads by default. I fully understand and accept that my way is…

Of course you should use what you like, but I'm also puzzled because you can "ignore" threads if you want in Zulip by keeping your focus on the channel. For example I have a channel called #oil-discuss. It has a bunch of separate threads. If I put the focus on the left bar in #oil-discuss, then it shows me all the messages in chronological order, regardless of thread. If you click on a thread, then you see only the m…

I'd suspect it depends on what you're using it for - our instance of chat is primarily roughly themed chat rooms where we can talk about video games and bitch about python or rust or scala or home improvement projects or the news. It's very much so a modern day AOL chatroom experience, and that's by desire. We have discourse for things that make sense for deep threading, but for the most part everyone ignores it and just uses the chatrooms or the fairly effervescent threading in MM (that is basically the same as Slack's).

If you're looking for a more real-time mailing list type behavior though, then Slack or MM would be a terrible, terrible, terrible choice imo.

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#42

Post by StavrosK » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

isbjorn16 wrote: post #26

StavrosK wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, that sounds like something was going wrong, threads don't just spawn, you have to create them, and a thread with a single comment kind of defeats the purpose. Oh, were you editing the subject every time you commented, maybe? That's not indicated, you only edit the subject when you want to create a new thread. In our use case, threads were relatively infrequent and specific to a topic, e.g. "middle name database…

Somehow we had like 15 users and not one of them managed to make a comment that wasn't a new thread - like I said though, it was like 2 years ago. Either there was a bug, or it was a design decision, or maybe even a misconfiguration on the server - regardless it got a hearty thumbs down by the community and we went on to try matrix. I was hoping for Zulip since it was a way easier install than matrix + riotweb was, e…

That's very odd to me, I've never had that problem and don't see why it could be.

Zulip is thread-only, it's just that thread can be used as channels if you ignore the top level (streams).

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#43

Post by wott » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

timwis wrote: post #30

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?

> That tends to put us back in email, though that has its own problems. What is the asynchronous version of zulip? Forums?

Newsgroups (NNTP)?

(I don't know Zulip and I don't know what problems you have with e-mail, so that's just a guess.)

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#44

Post by hereisdx » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

Apart from a user, I am also a contributor to the Zulip project, for the last ~7 months.

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.

Also, the documentation is very detailed and the codebase is very high quality. It's really easy to get started.

You can find the github org here: https://github.com/zulip

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#45

Post by tabbott » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

monadic2 wrote: post #35

How is the experience of trying to find a conversation from a few months ago?

A big benefit of the organization provided by every message being in a topic is that it makes finding this more efficient. E.g. if you remember that Steve made a joke about donuts in the conversation, you can search for messages sent by Steve mentioning donuts, find the topic, and from there find the actual conversation. I do this to find months-old or years-old conversations several times a week.

If you're curious to hear more, https://monadical.com/posts/how-to-make-remote-work-part-two... talks about this idea in more detail.

I also highly recommend making use of Zulip permalinks to conversations in issue trackers and other resources -- my anecdotal sense is most projects using Zulip do that a lot (the Zulip development team certainly does). Certainly the main feedback we've gotten on the zulip.com domain transition is "Will my permalinks keep working???". (Yes, they will).

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#46

Post by price » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

timwis wrote: post #30

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?

The asynchronous version of Zulip is Zulip. :-)

A thing I really like about how Zulip works is that a conversation can happen asynchronously just like email, as well as synchronously. And the same conversation can shift smoothly from one to the other and back. I work on Zulip, and we basically don't use email at all - it's all either in Zulip or on a GitHub thread. (And the interesting discussions, I increasingly try to make sure to do on Zulip because GitHub is such a frustrating place to have a conversation.)

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#47

Post by bovermyer » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

I would love to use this, but I don't manage any communities that aren't already married to either Discord or Slack.

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#48

Post by dTal » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

eigenspace wrote: post #18

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. The topics model is fantastic, having proper markdown and LaTeX support is also killer. The development team for Zulip is also really responsive and friendly. Coming from Slack, it was a breath of fresh air t…

That's excellent news. Being locked out of the community by virtue of it being hosted on a proprietary service, requiring a proprietary code blob to access, was one of the biggest sour notes I had coming to Julia.

(Now if only discourse.julialang.org links would render without Javascript!)

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#49

Post by evacchi » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

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.

Re: Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat

#50

Post by cobbzilla » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

hereisdx wrote: post #44

Apart from a user, I am also a contributor to the Zulip project, for the last ~7 months. 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 #learn…

As a fellow Zulip user and minor contributor, I wholeheartedly agree.

In addition to coordinating development teams on three continents, we also use Zulip as an integration hub. git commits go in the #commits channel, jenkins build status to #builds, and run-time errors to #errors.

We use errbit (API-compatible Airbrake clone) for error reporting and Zulip didn't have an errbit integration.

So I wrote one, and they integrated it within a few days. The Zulip team was super-responsive and easy to work with. It certainly helped that they had excellent docs on how to write integrations, and tons of examples.

Go Zulip!