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Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

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41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#41
post #12

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.

It's not a small thing, it's a huge thing. The way the entire UI is structured around this one difference is great, and makes for a completely different (and much, much better) experience.

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#42
post #35
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disclaimer: PM at Mattermost 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…

I've tried moving my teams to mattermost now twice and always we ran into the issue that integration for live meetings was painful. Neither zoom nor Google meets was possible to set up in an easy to use manner so everybody could jump on a call when needed

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#43

Big fan of Zulip. Only problem is that you don't get email notifications unless you're directly @ mentioned in a response, even if you're participating in a discussion, and even if they're replying directly to you. Otherwise I find the threading approach to be a big win.

You can set up Alert words in your personal settings and when that word appears in the chat, you will get notified as well.

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#44
post #26

great marketing, but again I can't see anything related to privacy.

We of course have a privacy policy (https://zulip.com/policies/privacy) and some security pages that touch on privacy (https://zulip.com/security/; https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/security-m...) but we put a lot of care into privacy issues both in product design and in what vendors we use, and adding a dedicated page about privacy is near the top of our TODO list for the website.

If anyone wants to help, I'd love links to privacy pages that folks really like and/or lists of questions that readers would like to see such a page clearly answer.

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#45
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/mobile-pus... has some more detail around mobile notifications. 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 .

The clients already use some secret for authenticating to the server, no? Can you not use the same secret for encryption? Or are you using tokens that need refreshing?

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#48
post #2

It is so bad though.

Obviously subjective but since comments mention UI: I love the web/desktop UI. It's got great power user features including well designed keyboard shortcuts. https://zulip.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts for details (my favorite is "n" for "next topic", which I use every morning to catch up on conversations).

n for next topic, j and k to move up and down within a topic, + to add a thumbs up to the current post, : to add any other emoji, and t to get a list of Recent topics so you can decide which ones to catch up on first. All these make Zulip so pleasant and breezy to use.

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#49
What’s the difference between a Zulip topic and a Slack channel? Certainly, having one big #engineering Slack channel is unproductive (hundreds of people interacting)… but who’s stopping you from creating #engineering-utc-9 for the people who require it? Put it in another way, what prevents us from using Zulip topics the “wrong way”?

Re: Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams

#50

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…

Federation would make me almost instantly recommend it for a handful of cases, but in the meantime they have a lot of catching up to do in the privacy department. 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…

This is extremely disingenuous. There are tons of usability issues when you have E2EE, to the point where you'd basically have to redesign Zulip and it wouldn't work the same way (e.g. how do you add a colleague to a chat channel and have them see old messages that they don't have keys for?).

I'm going to assume good faith in your comment, but I'm really having a hard time doing it, and I'm one of the people who worked for SilentCircle! Another one of those people currently works for Zulip (hey Austin!).

TL;DR: It would take a ton of effort and would basically require a pivot of the business model. Yet you present it as if it's some afterthought that can be tacked on, completely ignoring the fact that all none of their competitors (Slack, Teams, etc) support E2EE.

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