Zulip – Threaded real-time chat for distributed teams • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by itao » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 12:52 PM UTC

tasubotadas wrote: post #42

itao wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That suck and I'm sorry to hear that. We're releasing public beta for built-in calling functionality on June 15 for both cloud and self-hosted offerings, you could give it a try to see if it meets your needs.

I'd also still like to help you setup tools that your team already use if it's still relevant. Please talk to us in the ~Ask R&D channel on our community instance: https://community.mattermost.com/core/channels/ask-r-and-d

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

#92

Post by cjbprime » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

tabbott wrote: post #24

mherdeg wrote: post #14

What 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.

Howdy mherdeg! I don't think I've heard of Gale, nor can I find it now that you mention the name... Which I guess is consistent with your "fell off the face of the Earth" theory. If you or anyone else can find a link, I'd love to read about it :).

I used Gale for years (met my spouse there a long time ago!) -- I think you can think of it as a Zephyr clone (as the name implies.. but from Caltech), so it shares the same kind of auto-created sub-categories model, and has federation. There were a decent array of text, nurses, and GUI (Tk!) clients.

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

#93

Post by doomrobo » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

KennyBlanken wrote: post #38

samatman wrote: post #29

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…

Woah there at least let's acknowledge that e2ee is a BIG ask and would concretely hurt usability. A secure e2e messenger should pass the "mud puddle test" [0] meaning if you drop your devices in a mud puddle and then slip in said puddle and crack yourself on the head, you should be locked out of all your accounts.

Do you want a Zulip where account recovery is impossible by design? Or where conversation history is unavailable to new users [1]? You might say "well let people opt in if they want e2e" but that's not helpful either. If even 1 user in a group is not opted in then the entire group has the same security level.

[0] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/05/icloud-w...

[1] This must be the case unless you invent a p2p system for users to bring a new user up to date on the group. And even then people could voluntarily lie about past messages. There are neat ways around all this but the point is that this system is very complicated and doesn't currently exist in practice.

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

#94

Post by wscott » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

Zulip is great.

One thing that I don't see mentioned that is a huge deal that you don't realize at first. The topic for a message can be changed after the fact and by anyone. So you are having a big discussion and at some point it veers off into some interesting tangent (or pointless flamewar). The original person didn't know it that idea was unique and had interest, but afterwards a big chunk of topic_A was actually about topic_B. So later a helpful person will go back and change the topic of the message that started it and all the replies will also move to that new topic name.

This means that someone in another time zone or who was busy during the original conversation can come back later and see the ideas discussed and focus on just one ones that are interesting without having to read huge discussion threads. And the threads can be on-topic because people can prune it after-the-fact.

Yes, this does mean you need to be a "team" and trust each other to make reasonable edits to the chat history. Just like a wiki, it sounds like a crazy idea, but works great in practice.

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

#95

Post by baytowner » Mon, Jun 06, 2022, 1:55 AM UTC

wscott wrote: post #94

Zulip is great. One thing that I don't see mentioned that is a huge deal that you don't realize at first. The topic for a message can be changed after the fact and by anyone. So you are having a big discussion and at some point it veers off into some interesting tangent (or pointless flamewar). The original person didn't know it that idea was unique and had interest, but afterwards a big chunk of topic_A was actually…

Reminds me of thread moderation in forums - merging threads and such to keep similar topics together when they spilled over. I really liked the carousel demo and how they tried to differentiate, would be a good challenge to explain what you wrote in a single panel.