Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never used it. What's wrong with it?
UI is not great.
That’s what the grandparent comment said, what specifically do you find wrong with the UI? I for one really enjoy it and the keyboard shortcuts.
Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
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Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#12Given the 'tour', it's slack with named threads (that can be pinned).
I like that feature. But it seems a pretty small thing. What are the other things that stand out about it? other than being open source.
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
UI is not great.
First time I used it, it was a bit confusing, as I didn't really know what to expect. Is it email? Live chat? A forum? Turns out, it's a bit of both, and trying to use it as any single one of them, will probably make it harder to use. Basically, I treat it as a live chat where it's easier to participate in different topics at the same time, Slack on steroids where everything is a "Thread" basically.
Sounds similar to Flowdock model? I greatly preferred that and was so disappointed when Slack finally rolled out their version of threading. It felt almost useless in comparison.
Alas, Flowdock is dead now and I've learned to embrace Slack as the better remaining alternative over Teams or Google Chat.
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#14What happened to Gale? That was the other IM system I saw that felt like it had the complexity and internal self-consistency of Zephyr and it feels like it just kind of fell of the face of the earth.
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#15The carousel on the main page is very easily understandable, which is great!
The whole topics (sub-channels, basically) idea seems interesting as well, though personally the solution itself seems pretty similar to two other great pieces of software out there:
- Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ (the Jitsi integration was especially nice)
- Mattermost https://mattermost.com/ (really simple to setup)
Has anyone extensively used any of them and can share what details/differences jumped out at them? Admittedly, i probably missed most of those myself and just saw them as similar, self-hostable chat solutions.
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#16Given the 'tour', it's slack with named threads (that can be pinned). I like that feature. But it seems a pretty small thing. What are the other things that stand out about it? other than being open source.
As someone who has used Zulip for years, I consider the named threads to be the reason to use Zulip. When used properly, it makes following discussions actually possible without being drowned by other concurrent messages. I'd say Discord is superior in many other ways, but for me this one killer feature still makes me prefer Zulip for work.
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#17Given the 'tour', it's slack with named threads (that can be pinned). I like that feature. But it seems a pretty small thing. What are the other things that stand out about it? other than being open source.
For one, Zulip is a year older than Slack.
However, it is still has a ton of bridges and other integrations, and all the shiny things you'd expect from Slack.
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#18It is so bad though.
Yeah the UI make me feel like it was designed by developers. Which is cool if you love a clunky utilitarian vibe. :)
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#19Something I didn't see before, is that a bunch of open source communities seems to starting to use Zulip now as well. I've only seen it in a "remote software company" context before. Here are some case studies from Zulip themselves about specific organizations, how they moved to Zulip and how they are using it: - https://zulip.com/case-studies/rust/ - https://zulip.com/case-studies/asciidoctor/ - https://zulip.com/ca…
It does take a bit of getting used to. Zulip is kind of a cross between chat and a forum.
However, once I did get used to it I think it's been great. Organizing chat into defined topics is super useful for following discussions you're interested in, filtering out those you aren't and for keeping conversations going across time zones.
It's more discoverable than chat but not as rigid as an actual forum. I feel it works well once the learning curve has been surmounted.
Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams
#20It is so bad though.
I've never used it. What's wrong with it?
I loved most of it, but (1) the search feature, specially for non English language, rely on postgres tokenized search which is worse than slack. (2) there is no "gallery view" for all files shared with a group or a person. (3) The mobile app had different render from the web.. and bad RTL render (4) slack bots compatibility sometimes miss the mark..
Other than that... It worked fine. I kinda liked it but slack is more robust for me (even if slow).