Zulip means a lot to me, as it has been my introduction to open source through Google Summer of Code, and my first time actually working on a real codebase of a project that so many people love.
I'm excited about the Zulip Foundation as a new start; at the same time, I'm also a bit sad about the departure of the core team members. While I'm obviously biased, I can totally see the optics for people coming from Bun's acquisition—this is not that. Knowing Tim for 5 years, I'm confident that an incredible amount of thought has been put into this, and that this is in Zulip's best interest for its sustainability and integrity. I hope Zulip and team all the best for the next 10 years and more to come.
The Zulip Foundation
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Re: The Zulip Foundation
#52For those looking for more context on Zulip, we did a major release a couple weeks ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2026/04/27/zulip-12-0-released/ .
Thanks for all you do.
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#53Concretely, how are you going to manage PR reviews? Even with today’s staff they are very slow (weeks for a round of NITS at a time), so with more developers leaving they’re going to explode and further discourage external contributors.
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#54I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.
> IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams
I always think of it as being halfway between those and more traditional forums (PHPBB, discourse, etc).
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#55bro just say: "Anthropic is going to pay me a beefy salary and it's exciting!" what's this salad come on: "I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity." it's pretty funny
Come on. He ran Zulip for 10 years!
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#56> It’s hard these days to feel confident that a company whose product you love won’t yield to commercial pressure and start selling your data, putting in ads, or otherwise violating your trust. It’s been a challenge to convincingly make the case that this won’t happen to Zulip, especially to folks who might not have time to investigate deeply. The Zulip Foundation, which has the goal of serving the public good, makes…
PS. With the sincerity out of the way - can't wait for the upcoming Rust rewrite!
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#57I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.
> IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams I always think of it as being halfway between those and more traditional forums (PHPBB, discourse, etc).
I thought of it that way too when I was onboarding into it.
When introducing new people to it, I like the topics to email threads, as they also have a subject line and replies.
It also gels with the "inbox" part of Zulip's UI.
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#58I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.
My only gripe is that on my phone sometimes it takes like 30 seconds to load, which doesn't seem to happen for almost anything else
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not really “OSS devs getting paid” if they stop being OSS developers to get paid
Given that we don't know what Tim will be working on at Anthropic, given his history of commitment to open source, it seems a bit early to say he's stopped being an OSS developer just because he's changed jobs. Anthropic has done a lot for open source, specifically giving Mozilla access to Mythos to patch Firefox before they release it to the world.
> Anthropic has done a lot for open source, specifically giving Mozilla access to Mythos to patch Firefox before they release it to the world.
So generous, helping fix the problem they created. The fire department who went around setting fires.
To be clear, i’m not coming for Tim, or anyone else who moved from OSS to closed when it was the right choice for them. Get paid! I have written code for pay and for free - getting paid is nicer. But anthropic isn’t exactly a bastion of open source community, and my default assumption is anybody who joins a massive frontier llm company will be working on closed source projects.
Re: The Zulip Foundation
#60I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.
My only gripe is that on my phone sometimes it takes like 30 seconds to load, which doesn't seem to happen for almost anything else
There's new long-lived connection support in Zulip 12.0 that will enable the mobile app to do a lot better for startup in organizations with multiple 10ks of users.
I think it's expected to be enabled in the mobile apps in the next couple weeks.