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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

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Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#191

Post by fletchowns »

StavrosK wrote: post #187
scrollaway wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

¯\_(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…

I will forever mourn and be angered by Mozilla giving up on Persona so easily.

Why is Persona dead? Visiting the site doesn't seem to give any indication it's dead...

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#192

Post by PhasmaFelis »

catern wrote: post #106
scrollaway wrote: post #92

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...

Was that really necessary?

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#193

Post by tabbott »

mahouse wrote: post #168
tabbott wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks a lot better on my Linux laptop! We're investigating.

I have found bugs on that installation guide. For example it tells you to install the certificate chain to /etc/ssl/certs/zulip.combined-chain.crt But nginx looks for it in /etc/ssl/certs/zulip-combined-chain.crt Also during your installation you download this deb file to /root/zulip/python-django-guardian_1.3-1~zulip4_all.deb But the script then tries to install it from /root/python-django-guardian_1.3-1~zulip4_all.…

Thanks for reporting! Both of those are already fixed in the latest tarball on the website.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#194

Post by catern »

sanderjd wrote: post #115
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...

Your comment is informative, but the last sentence is unnecessary and inflammatory.

You're right. I would delete it, but it's past the edit deadline.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#195

Post by pyre »

scrollaway wrote: post #142
twic wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can already get a hacked up public chat via Slack. There's a package (which is all set to run on Heroku) that automates the process of sending an invite to the Slack organization so that anyone on the public web can do it.

I noticed this when the Bootstrap 4.0a announcement had a link inviting you to join their Slack:

> For those jamming on v4 with us, we also have a dedicated v4 Slack channel. Jump in to talk shop and work with your fellow Bootstrappers. If you haven’t yet, join our official Slack room![0].

[0] https://bootstrap-slack.herokuapp.com/

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#196

Post by e12e »

inopinatus wrote: post #144
rikkus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Much of that can be had with a IRC bot. That doesn't include media handling, but you could do search via 1-on-1 /msg (query) with a bot. Then it'd truly be "in client" search.

Most would probably prefer a web ui, with search -- but recording chat could still be done via a bot.

I wouldn't say you could get most of the whole slack experience with just IRC, and you'd probably have to do some work (if only configuring channels/bots/find a web ui etc).

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#197

Post by lips »

chc wrote: post #62
scrollaway wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solut…

As noted in the OP, Zulip is not a closed-source product anymore. But I'm not sure that really helps so much with the immediate problem, since it's more the proliferation of protocols rather than the scarcity of source that causes issues.

But one more protocol on the stack with mac/windows/iphone/android clients is, IMHO, an entirely different ball of wax than a libre project with only a single platform under its belt. In my situation, the existence of mobile clients is clinch for actually pitching it to any org I participate in.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#198

Post by e12e »

scrollaway wrote: post #102
fletchowns wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? From what I've been able to figure out, H.323 looks like it's one of the better candidates of protocols that exist today and is "reasonably" simple... while SIP... well, SIP smells a lot like it came from big TelCos. And not in a good way.

See eg: https://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#199

Post by manigandham »

thought_alarm wrote: post #178
manigandham wrote: post #140

Side note: Please STOP using tiny font weights. Text becomes ridiculously hard/painful to read. There's no reason to use a font-weight of 200 (or anything less than 500) on body text, save that for the headlines. http://i.imgur.com/r7a794n.png

I'd be curious to see how the screenshot below looks on your system. http://i.imgur.com/xCWBCcB.png

I'm not sure what you're asking here... that text looks fine but it's also much larger than mine. Are you on a 4k/retina/high DPI monitor?

I'm viewing on a 1900x1200 24"

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#200

Post by e12e »

inopinatus wrote: post #150
austenallred wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

You forgot h.323. On the surface, it looks to me like a "saner SIP", or XMPP with working, standard audio/video support -- but I might be wrong.

I'm not sure why people claim IRC lacks archiving support. Isn't a bit like saying SMTP lacks archiving support? And doesn't basic IRC always go through a server? So there shouldn't be any technical barrier against a server archiving all chats (private and in channels)?

As for NNTP, I'm not sure if NNTP over TLS, peering with only trusted sites (aka for internal use) would make sense or not. I never did use Usenet much. At least the D language forums have made an effort to bring NNTP into the www era[d].

It's interesting that no one seems to do a decent job of (server side) archiving for XMPP -- partly I think it's because as you state, the XEPs have gotten out of hand -- and partly XMPP appears to be especially popular for users that want privacy -- and treat ephemeral chat as a feature.

[d] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

(format note, you probably should've just listed the protocols in separate paragraphs, as indented blocks with lines longer than ~50 characters doesn't format very well on hn).

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