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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

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Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#141

Post by inopinatus »

TillE wrote: post #77
tbingmann wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best ask them first via email.

I don't even know my girlfriend's email address. I'm 30, and she's only a few years younger. The world is strange now. I miss Google Wave. Not the messy implementation, but the promise of a big influential company throwing its weight behind a modern, open communication protocol.

This. This was how I learned that the whole "don't be evil" thing was a load of bovine manure.

Google Wave, as an XMPP-based protocol, held enormous promise as a federated rich discussion standard. Sadly their first implementation was clunky and had a confused approach to standards and integration; it was effectively stillborn.

Then Google killed Google Talk by strongly favouring their closed "Hangouts" product which is practically inaccessible from chat clients. They went further, making it impossible to federate Google Talk to other XMPP services. Facebook and Microsoft followed suit, either ending XMPP support or closing their federation capability.

All three are therefore complicit in the worst abrogation of Internet interoperability since the early days of MSIE. And Google, in a land grab for consumer eyeballs, was the cheerleader.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#142

Post by scrollaway »

twic wrote: post #139
zyxley wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do. That's kind of a weird statement to me, because every time I've sold a techie-type person on Slack it's been by describing it as "private IRC with persistent history and a bunch of other neat things".

private IRC. Hence global interoperability and federation is not what this and Slack are aiming to do.

You're missing the point. Just because it's not what they're aiming to do doesn't mean the tech isn't appropriate for it.

You're commenting on their business model rather than the tech. For all you know, Slack could be planning to expand their business to hosting public chat rooms, then your comment wouldn't make any sense anymore.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#143

Post by scrollaway »

rikkus wrote: post #137
shanemhansen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it possible to get what Slack provides using IRC? I mean the whole package, not just the text chat. Consider enterprise-friendliness, excellent mobile clients, zero-setup required (no separate keep-you-online relays), really easy integrations, etc.? We are adopting Slack because it's great and I'd have loved to make a case for IRC but I wouldn't know what server to recommend (we don't really want to install it, bu…

The closest you can get is a foss slack alternative such as Mattermost, and push for an IRC bridge (Mattermost is working on it it seems: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/issues/650).

But it's not possible to get what you're asking without breaking the IRC protocol - it's not easily extended and the formatting rules are icky mIRC crap.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#144

Post by inopinatus »

rikkus wrote: post #137
shanemhansen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it possible to get what Slack provides using IRC? I mean the whole package, not just the text chat. Consider enterprise-friendliness, excellent mobile clients, zero-setup required (no separate keep-you-online relays), really easy integrations, etc.? We are adopting Slack because it's great and I'd have loved to make a case for IRC but I wouldn't know what server to recommend (we don't really want to install it, bu…

Also in-client searchable archives, media handling, history editing. All require going outside the IRC protocols.

IRC was designed by hackers, for hackers and it shows. Twenty years ago, IRC was my talk destination of choice and I operated a server within a major IRC network; these days my startup uses Slack which I determined to be the "least irritating" of the 21st century options.

I had high hopes for Google Wave but it was sadly stillborn.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#145

Post by tabbott »

mansilladev wrote: post #113

So, if you're going to tool around, and think, "Hey, I've got an Ubuntu/Debian box laying around" -- you best just follow the repo README advice and do this on a virtual box. The server install scripts have some heavy dependencies (puppet, django), if the "sudo -i" wasn't a clue enough. Also, if you are doing this, /root/zulip/scripts/lib/install's wgets need some "--no-check-certificate" flags. When I get zulip serv…

Yeah I'm hoping that the community will do some work on simplifying this -- our focus on the installation process side was to make there be at least one installation process for the two use cases that works completely automatically.

FWIW at Zulip we usually did our development environment on our laptop not inside a VM; it's not that hard to do, but the nice thing about the Vagrant setup (written as part of the Hack Week project) is that it's for people with no familiarity with the software to get to a running environment.

It should be feasible to make a Debian package for it that plays nicely; as you can see most of the dependencies are already packaged.

Everything scripts/lib/install downloads via https has a valid cert; I suspect the issue may be that we should bundle the verification chain.

I'd love to see notes on whatever issues you encounter in a github issue or sent to the mailing list so we can make things smoother.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#146

Post by sinak »

tabbott wrote: post #136
sinak wrote: post #130

My one big question is: does Zulip support push notifications to the next version of the mobile app if you self-host the server? I'm not exactly sure how that'd be possible, but I wonder if they've managed to figure it out somehow. It's the one big problem with self-hosted chat apps like Rocket.chat and others - APNS and GCM are both centralized, and it's hard to federate them to provide push services for self-hosted…

I think there are two approaches one could take for doing this: * It seems like one way you could make that possible would be to make it really easy to do white-label builds of the Zulip mobile apps. E.g. the "Zulip for example.com" app. Would be more overhead than is ideal for smaller deployments. * It should be possible to have APNS/GCM traffic go through a central community-hosted service that dispatches the messa…

Hey tabbott, I'd love to chat about this more if you're interested, it's something we've been particularly looking for. My email is sina@eff.org.

White-label builds of Zulip apps would work, but at least in our case wouldn't be ideal. Having a central community-hosted service would be much better.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#147

Post by catern »

scrollaway wrote: post #109
catern wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

> fat lot of good that does if you don't know what XEPs to set up when dealing with other servers.

I have no idea what XEPs to set up when dealing with other servers. I did not have to set up any such thing. Like I said, federation (server to server communication) works out of the box, at least on Debian.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#148

Post by austenallred »

tbingmann wrote: post #8

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.

There have been and always will be competing products and communities that serve similar purposes. We use what we think is the best one. Is this a bad thing?

(Not to mention the fact that Slack is for internal teams, not for IRC-like discussions, though our open newsroom (http://newsroom.grasswire.com) and some other communities (http://fpchat.com) have repurposed it for that.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#149

Post by kevinr »

We've been using Zulip internally for a couple of years now. We've used IRC and Jabber, looked at Slack and Hipchat and Skype and Lync, and somehow keep coming back to Zulip. It lets us have real, ongoing, and substantive conversations, with a large number of participants, without being overwhelmed.

I sometimes feel like Twitter is actually a better comparison for Zulip than Slack---in Zulip like on Twitter, it's easy to watch and participate in multiple conversations at the same time. Zulip's threading model exists somewhere between Slack's rigid "rooms" model and Twitter's everything-is-public model, so it's much lighter-weight to participate in multiple places at once than on Slack but it's also easier than on Twitter to have the right conversation with the right people without bothering others with something irrelevant to them. And Zulip's threading model makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space without stepping on each others' toes or getting distracted.

Our remote folks rely on it particularly heavily. When Zulip got acquired it was our remote employees and their managers who were showing up outside my cube with pitchforks when I breathed a word of turning it off. It gives folks in other offices or working from home a watercooler and a way to virtually tap a group of coworkers lightly on the shoulder when they need help.

Basically we can't live without it, so I'm super-excited to see it finally open sourced. Thanks for making it happen. :-)

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#150

Post by inopinatus »

austenallred wrote: post #148
tbingmann wrote: post #8

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.

There have been and always will be competing products and communities that serve similar purposes. We use what we think is the best one. Is this a bad thing? (Not to mention the fact that Slack is for internal teams, not for IRC-like discussions, though our open newsroom ( http://newsroom.grasswire.com ) and some other communities ( http://fpchat.com ) have repurposed it for that.

I think that "best tool for the job" attitude is a straw man. It seems to presuppose that "the job" is per-organisation, or even that there is one job.

In truth many of us believe that the goal is enabling everyone - universally - to communicate without a single body holding centralised control of message history, reachability and access.

Quick review of the globally federated protocols:

  Email is too slow and bulky and lacks "group" capability
  IRC is deeply unreliable and lacks identity, archiving, and media management
  NNTP is too amorphous, slow, and lacks any privacy or security controls
  Everyone thinks SIP is just for telephony (it isn't)
  XMPP is phenomenally complicated yet held great promise
    - if only everyone could agree on the extensions and semantics.
    - but was murdered by Google.
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