Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 323 posts

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#251

Post by ara4n »

hobarrera wrote: post #244
ara4n wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Matrix lead here] The open source clients for both Matrix and XMPP are improving a lot currently. On the Matrix side there's vector.im; on XMPP there's Kaiwa and Conversations.im. If you want to help break the fragmentation and have an open standards based approach please run the clients and help us make them better - it is open source, after all!

Something really missing about matrix (at least last time I looked) is a hosted option with my own domain. I don't want to use the domain you provide, because I'm tied to a provider forever. I don't want to set up my server right now, because it's just too much work to try something that I may end up dumping (because nobody else I know uses it yet). The overhead to get it is too high, when you're just betting it'll p…

Yup, agreed. We're planning to provide domain vhosting (ie point the SRV for your domain to matrix.org and you'll get your own server instance) which should help a bit, although doing that for free could start to get uneconomic. We also need to work out a nice way to let users migrate between providers.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#252

Post by StavrosK »

fletchowns wrote: post #191
StavrosK wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

What notatoad said, plus I don't think they're maintaining things very well any more. Last time I tried to use the ecosystem, various non-core things were breaking. Huge pity, it's a very well-designed protocol.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#253

Post by bshimmin »

proksoup wrote: post #22
SwellJoe wrote: post #10

I was just about to try out Mattermost for our company communications. It integrates with a few things including gitlab, but Zulip seems to have a larger number of integration options, which is awesome. Anybody tried both and have thoughts on them? I still prefer to host my own infrastructure, and I want to be able to archive and categorize a discussion (after it's happened) for searchability, but a couple of our peo…

I think HipChat might be the only one backing the XMPP horse still. A timeline [1]. [1] https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf

That chart is amazing (and depressing, as another commenter said). I counted and I've used 18 different ones. I've also used a few others for video and audio conferencing, like WebEx (unless that falls under a particular Cisco one in the chart, I don't know).

Currently I'm "only" using Slack, Skype, iMessage, and Google+ Hangouts (very occasionally, with considerable loathing).

It strikes me the situation is inherently ridiculous, but after not far off 20 years of dealing with it, I can't say it bothers me that much anymore.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#254

Post by new299 »

kevinr wrote: post #149

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 eas…

I'm sure it's a great communications tool, however since Rice joined Dropbox's board (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/) I'd have severe concerns using anything released by Dropbox. Even if it's open source. And while I apologize for a tangential comment, people should be aware of the politics promoted by their software vendors.

Hopefully if it's a truly valuable tool it will be forked and audited.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#256

Post by evook »

sgk284 wrote: post #246
hobarrera wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something that quite surprised me: being a software company: how is it that you've never gotten around to a Linux client? Do most of you use the web-version, or is dropbox mostly windows-centric (sorry, I'm quite ignorant about dropbox team's culture. :D )

Most tech companies (doubly so in the Bay Area) develop on Macs and deploy (servers) on Linux. There'd be little pressure to develop a Linux client since most devs are spending their day on a Mac.

That's probably not true[0]. In my experience you would often endure belittling or sheep calls, even bullying, if you walk into the office with a MacBook or an Iphone. We've customers where it's not even allowed to store corporate secrets on non-linux os. But that are highly professional financial or insurance dev corporations.

[0] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#257

Post by michaelmior »

evook wrote: post #256
sgk284 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most tech companies (doubly so in the Bay Area) develop on Macs and deploy (servers) on Linux. There'd be little pressure to develop a Linux client since most devs are spending their day on a Mac.

That's probably not true[0]. In my experience you would often endure belittling or sheep calls, even bullying, if you walk into the office with a MacBook or an Iphone. We've customers where it's not even allowed to store corporate secrets on non-linux os. But that are highly professional financial or insurance dev corporations. [0] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

I'm confused about what the linked dataset is supposed to show as it doesn't seem related. In any case, I've certainly noticed ancedotally that MacBook usage is quite high.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#258

Post by morganvachon »

JoshM33k wrote: post #56
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.

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.

It would be nice if the iOS and Android built-in Contacts apps had better support/integration for all the various messaging apps that work on their respective platforms. Rather than trying to remember who uses which services, their contact card could simply contain the entire roster of their services and usernames, and you could initiate a conversation in that service from within the contact card. I know you can do this with the baked in messaging services for each platform (SMS/MMS and iMessage for iOS, SMS/MMS and Hangouts for Android), but I'm talking about a one-stop-contacts-shop for every major messaging platform. Maybe that would require too much cooperation between messaging app authors and the big OS vendors, but I think it would be possible.

An alternative solution would be a cross platform third party Contacts app that offers that kind of integration. I've seen multi-messenger apps (Trillian, IM+) for both platforms, but that's not quite the same thing and it inevitably leaves out important functionality from the official apps.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#259

Post by coldtea »

zyxley wrote: post #121
coldtea wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do. > and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. Not sure about that. As it seems, for 99% of the world who only uses "closed source products" for chat, they do cut it. (Interoperability is orthogonal of course).

> 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".

The "private" part kind of gives their game away, doesn't it?

It's not meant to be an IRC replacement. That it has point to point communication, channels etc, doesn't make it IRC.

Slack is all about the default stuff it bundles with it, and the features it includes as native for work teams.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#260

Post by inopinatus »

e12e wrote: post #219
inopinatus wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't resolve the multifarious issues with identity, reliability, scalability, federation, standardisation &c &c that further rule IRC out from being the universal panacea.

It depends on the context. You can't federate with Google, Microsoft, Facebook anyway -- and you won't convert the world to use your favourite new protocol (most likely). So that just leaves you with an easier problem: how can I host conversations etc for my team/org/my friends? And I think a single, isolated irc server should work fine for that use case, and work fine with many different irc clients? So no, it's not…

That is not an "easier problem" - that is repeating the problem: yet another venue/client/service we all have to be logged into to find one another.

Moreover, I'm really not interested in spending any time whatsoever on configuring and maintaining an IRC server and a fleet of bots, nor on teaching non-technical users in how to use the resulting heath-robinson system. Really, no. A world of no. I have run both a private IRC service and a public node of a very large network. It's a huge time sink. I've moved on.

As I see it, the only problem in this domain worth burning hours on is developing a protocol (and interoperable implementations thereof) that achieves everything the likes of Slack and Hipchat can do, only in a decentralized and federated manner.

Post reply on HN