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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

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Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right by why maintain the chat app? Why not just buy slack.

I mean the slack product!

BradRuderman you are conflating two different things that are not necessarily related:

(1) How Dropbox chooses to satisfy internal requirements/demand for a group chat solution

(2) Why/whether Dropbox should have acquired/acqhired the Zulip team

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad as it may be, it's pretty clear at this point that XMPP won't be the communication protocol of the future. Everyone who ever seriously worked on it seem to have come out of the experience a broken man. Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge and the promises of compatibility with most XMPP servers break down pretty fast unless you know which extensions to support. All these problems are fixable but I don't s…

Who might be the right entity to take on creating a replacement for XMPP?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

One of the best things that could happen today I think is Google open sourcing the Hangouts protocol. It's a reasonable alternative to XMPP and has a massive userbase. The clients are pretty horrible but that might be completely unrelated to how good the protocol is (Note: I have no idea how good it is. Because it's closed source.).

I was hopeful for a while but I don't really see it happening anymore :( Oh well...

Edit: Oh and the worst part: Communication is just one side of that coin. The other side is identity and it's one hell of a side. OpenID was a disaster. Mozilla got it mostly right with Persona but completely botched the marketing and has all but given up on it now. There is no decent foss protocol for identity/authentication today other than Persona, and nobody is working on one. There was a time indeed where I could've pictured Google working on solving this just for the hell of it. Just because it would improve the world. That Google is gone, and there's nobody with the appropriate reach that seems willing to do it now.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#103
post #13

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.

Strangeloop (the programming conference) is using a slack, as we speak. it's more than teams :)

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.

Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company. I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.

That sounds like a problem with the company. I can understand Slack and Hangouts (at least until Slack adds voice chat), but all that other stuff sounds like poor organization on the company's part.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got the team behind it, who now work on other parts of Dropobox

Right by why maintain the chat app? Why not just buy slack.

I don't understand why you are being downvoted for legitimate questions.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#106
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were on their way out as some services were federating via XMPP. Then some stopped supporting it.

Sad as it may be, it's pretty clear at this point that XMPP won't be the communication protocol of the future. Everyone who ever seriously worked on it seem to have come out of the experience a broken man. Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge and the promises of compatibility with most XMPP servers break down pretty fast unless you know which extensions to support. All these problems are fixable but I don't s…

>Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge

Not even remotely true! Prosody on Debian works out of the box, including federation. You just have to configure the domain name.

It's not hard to set up an XMPP server. It's hard to set up Ejabberd. Ejabberd is not the only XMPP server. Prosody is very easy to set up.

Honestly, people, think before you speak...

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad as it may be, it's pretty clear at this point that XMPP won't be the communication protocol of the future. Everyone who ever seriously worked on it seem to have come out of the experience a broken man. Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge and the promises of compatibility with most XMPP servers break down pretty fast unless you know which extensions to support. All these problems are fixable but I don't s…

Who might be the right entity to take on creating a replacement for XMPP?

https://matrix.org is a promising candidate.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#109
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad as it may be, it's pretty clear at this point that XMPP won't be the communication protocol of the future. Everyone who ever seriously worked on it seem to have come out of the experience a broken man. Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge and the promises of compatibility with most XMPP servers break down pretty fast unless you know which extensions to support. All these problems are fixable but I don't s…

>Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge Not even remotely true! Prosody on Debian works out of the box, including federation. You just have to configure the domain name. It's not hard to set up an XMPP server. It's hard to set up Ejabberd. Ejabberd is not the only XMPP server. Prosody is very easy to set up. Honestly, people, think before you speak...

> Honestly, people, think before you speak...

I didn't just make this up on the spot, I've been dealing with these issues for years. So yes, I've thought about them a lot.

I used to run a prosody server on my home box. It is great software and a fantastic daemon compared to ejabberd (edit: Configuration-wise that is) but fat lot of good that does if you don't know what XEPs to set up when dealing with other servers. I shut it down because it was pretty much useless and I wasn't able to talk to my gtalk buddies from it anymore.

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