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Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

blog.zulip.org

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Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#121

Post by rryan »

SXX wrote: post #36
rryan wrote: post #15

They offer free hosting for open source projects. It has been really great for Mixxx (floss DJ software), allowing our ~10 person distributed dev team to work together much more effectively.

That one is interesting. Any major downsides / upsides compared to slack other than limits?

We're coming from Freenode as our only real-time communication so the difference is night and day. Slack is a no-go for many due to not being FLOSS and I'm concerned about vendor lock-in if they were to stop being so generous or run out money and shut down.

Slack's threading model is much worse than Zephyr/Zulip's IMO. Especially on mobile. The streams/topics flow in the "all conversations" view is an incredibly intuitive way to keep track of everything that is going on.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#122

Post by tabbott »

ciupicri wrote: post #111
morgancmartin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I had something similar happen to me. I started out at the _ sign in _ page, I attempted to sign in with google, it remarked that I don't have an account and sent me to the _ sign up _ page that looked very similar to the sign in page, and from there, I was able to create an account via my google account.

It doesn't work for me with GitHub. 1. https://chat.zulip.org/register/ 2. "Sign up with GitHub" 3. "Authorize zulip" 4. Got redirected to "Sign up for Zulip" (https://chat.zulip.org/complete/github/?redirect_state=...) 5. Went to https://chat.zulip.org/ and 6. got redirected to https://chat.zulip.org/login/ 7. "Login with GitHub" 8. "Zulip account not found."

Can you open an issue on http://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/new? We haven't heard similar reports in the year since the GitHub auth backend was added, so I'm guessing there's something special about your account (or maybe a problematic browser extension); I'd love to debug this with you.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#123

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

zestyping wrote: post #33

It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most productive group chat" and "email threading model." The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to find.

I don't understand why so many applications do this. "Try our service! But we won't show you what it looks like or give you any details at all!" No, I'm not even going to consider your software if there aren't at least a few screenshots on the frontpage. It gets especially annoying when they use stylized wireframes in place of screenshots.

Why is it so difficult to take some screenshots and put on them on the homepage and/or features page?

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#124

Post by tabbott »

zingmars wrote: post #74

I love Zulip. I really wish other IM clients implemented functionality similar to Zulip's threading. It allows for easily filtering converstations and makes reading history that much easier. That said, what Zulip lacks right now is polish. Server installation for example is a mess. You basically need a dedicated Debian machine to install it. There is a docker image that I'm using, but it's rather unstable (if I will…

Thanks for the feedback! I agree with some of these complaints (e.g. I very much wanted to fix the push notification registration process in this release), but I'd like to clarify a few things:

* Needing an SSL certificate should not really be a barrier. We now have an installer option to use Certbot which works great if you're on the public Internet, and if you're not, we have simple instructions for creating a self-signed certificate.

* Zulip has never had a Cordova app. I assume you're referring to the [legacy Android app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulip.andr...), which was written in Java (and is deprecated in favor of [an RN app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zulipmobil...) which lets us share most of the hard work of mobile development between Android and iOS).

* I'm surprised by your comment about search; we often hear from users that they love Zulip's search. Can you open an issue with more details about what you're seeing? I'm wondering if e.g. search is broken in the Docker image.

As a sidenote, for the Electron desktop app in particular, all the performance issues that we could reproduce went away with the latest update (not because we changed something in our code, but because we upgraded Electron which had upgraded Chromium to a newer version with fewer performance bugs). If you're still seeing issues with app version 1.9.0, I'd love to see a profile captured from the app's developer tools.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#125

Post by detaro »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #123
zestyping wrote: post #33

It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most productive group chat" and "email threading model." The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to find.

I don't understand why so many applications do this. "Try our service! But we won't show you what it looks like or give you any details at all!" No, I'm not even going to consider your software if there aren't at least a few screenshots on the frontpage. It gets especially annoying when they use stylized wireframes in place of screenshots. Why is it so difficult to take some screenshots and put on them on the homepag…

It's harder to sell how the magic unicorn solves all your companies problems when directly next to it a screenshot screams "It's a chat app!" maybe?

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#126

Post by tabbott »

SXX wrote: post #69
tabbott wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zulip uses python-social-auth for some other backends, so for the more general version of your question about doing some other third-party auth, the answer is not super hard. That said, it looks like python-social-auth doesn't have a backend for Discourse: https://python-social-auth.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends... . It's also probably not super hard to just add a direct authentication backend for Discourse.

Thanks for information. Seems like I should be able to do it. Though if we want to have little customization like that does it mean we'll absolutely need to host it on our servers or something like that possible on hosted plan? PS: Obviously I get that If I manage to push code upstream hosted option will support it, but I suppose it's might take a while.

Once something is merged to master in zulip.git, it's usually on zulipchat.com production within a few days.

So if you do it in a way that gets merged (which requires, e.g., automated tests appropriate for an authentication backend) and is configurable for just one organization in a multi-organization server, you would not need to host your own servers.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#128

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

detaro wrote: post #125
apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why so many applications do this. "Try our service! But we won't show you what it looks like or give you any details at all!" No, I'm not even going to consider your software if there aren't at least a few screenshots on the frontpage. It gets especially annoying when they use stylized wireframes in place of screenshots. Why is it so difficult to take some screenshots and put on them on the homepag…

It's harder to sell how the magic unicorn solves all your companies problems when directly next to it a screenshot screams "It's a chat app!" maybe?

Do companies actually pay for software they can't justify ahead of time? It took me months to justify the costs of a damn password manager and explaining why sending passwords over email and our XMPP was a bad idea

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#129

Post by tabbott »

zerkten wrote: post #108

How frequent and painful are Zulip upgrades? This is one of the reasons folks like SaaS for communications tools which always seem to be changing.

Having your team's core communication tool go down and be hard to bring back up can be quite painful. So as a project, we put a lot of effort into release management to minimize the risk of that happening. I personally postmortem every report of an error when upgrading.

As a result, for most folks, installing a security/bugfix release Just Works with a few seconds of downtime. For a release like this one with 3000+ commits, dozens of database migrations, and tons of new features, our largest sites found it Just Worked with about a minute of downtime while the database migrations were running.

If you really care about availability like we do with zulipchat.com, it's possible to have downtime be seconds even with the database migrations, but that requires a bit more expertise on how Zulip works than we think it's fair to expect server administrators to learn, so we don't recommend that to most folks.

So the main downside in this space of self-hosting is that zulipchat.com runs very close to master, which in practice means you'll get new features on zulipchat.com first (though folks running their own server can always upgrade; you just end up on the hook for the work). On the flipside, self-hosting is better for i18n (since our volunteer translators generally make sure languages get to 100% around a release, but new strings may not get translated for weeks after the code gets into production on zulipchat.com).

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#130

Post by neurotrace »

tabbott wrote: post #60
zestyping wrote: post #33

It's really hard to get a sense of how Zulip works without any screenshots or videos anywhere on zulip.org, just general descriptions like "the world's most productive group chat" and "email threading model." The fastest way to find out how it works is to go to https://chat.zulip.org/accounts/login/ and click "Log in with GitHub". They really need to make that path easier to find.

We're definitely planning to provide a slick explanation on zulipchat.com. Using chat.zulip.org is helpful, especially if you visit a day later and read the message history; since you really only experience Zulip's magic properly when catching up on a bunch of unread messages (the `n` hotkey in particular is super great). That said, https://zulipchat.com/features has a screenshot; and https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/…

One stripped down screenshot is not enough. I need to see at least one image of your application in all of it's glory from the moment I hit the page. More is better. You can describe it all you want but if I can't actually see an image of it in action, I'm not going to be interested enough to go through the (poorly documented) install process.
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