31–40 of 95 posts
The 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) Both of those also…
great marketing, but again I can't see anything related to privacy.
You have to choose server-wide between sending none (very private), sending redacted notifications (somewhat private, somewhat useful) or sending the full message in the notification (they see all your messages, but very convenient). Or I guess you can modify the mobile client and set up your own push notifications.
The 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) Both of those also…
I haven't used Rocket.Chat, but I've used the other two: Threading feels bolted on in Mattermost, but is the primary feature of zulip. Think of Zulip as a realtime version of NNTP, and Mattermost as a more modern IRC with a "reply" feature. The "right" way to use Zulip and Mattermost is quite different, though each one can be easily used as an inferior version of the other.
We of course use our own product every day and when I first joined the company in 2019 I also found that threading felt "bolted on". Primarily because channels rendered everything in the same linear feed regardless if it was a message or comment so there wasn't much point in taking the time to first hit reply.
However, Collapsed Reply Thread [0] has been a game changer for me and not only do I no longer feel that way about threading, my productivity would plunge without it. That feature has been in public beta since last summer [1] and will go into general availability in two weeks to officially become the "right" way to use Mattermost. Not to say that it's the same as Zulip, just sharing an updated perspective.
[0] https://docs.mattermost.com/channels/organize-conversations....
[1] https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-beta/
Given 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.
I hope at some point to see a federated implementation of the Zulip communication model over Matrix. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/356 I'm at a point of choice fatigue with communication platforms where Zulip being siloed is more important than it being open source. I'm phasing out proprietary platforms in a way that will take years and may never complete. I don't want more apps, I don't want another user acc…
Behold, the two five year old tickets requesting that they stop passing notification text to Apple/Google cloud messaging:
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954
https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/1190
For those who don't know: if you have an app and want to send a notification to a user, you use Apple or Google push notification services. In both cases, the notification is plaintext but transmitted via encrypted channel to Apple or Google, then transmitted via encrypted channel to the user's phone. But in each case, the push messaging provider gets to see the messaging text.
So companies that give a shit about your privacy send a token instead, that says "hey, wake up, something happened, fetch a notification." Apple likely doesn't do anything with the notification text, but it's a given Google datamines the hell out of it.
They also still don't have any form of e2ee. Here's another five year old ticket requesting end to end encrypted chat, where a bunch of people say "here's a long list of apps that support e2ee" and Zulip devs go "gosh golly how do they handle keys? Math is hard."
great marketing, but again I can't see anything related to privacy.
It's very easy to self-host. The only real gotcha are mobile notifications, because those are sent through centralized servers not hosted by you (because of how mobile APIs work). You have to choose server-wide between sending none (very private), sending redacted notifications (somewhat private, somewhat useful) or sending the full message in the notification (they see all your messages, but very convenient). Or I g…
Our plan is to add end-to-end encryption for mobile push notifications, and we've got a design, but limited progress on implementation. One can follow the issue here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954.
Something 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…
Zulip has long been popular with open source projects ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ ), as well as a bunch of other non-business use cases (teaching, research, conferences, etc.). One reason folks might feel like it's new is that we recently reworked the Zulip website to discuss these other use cases for which Zulip is popular. We have always had a practice of prioritizing feedback and feature requests from ope…