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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

#61

Post by distances »

voidmain wrote: post #6

We used Zulip (then a commercial product) at FoundationDB, and really liked it. We had teams in two cities. The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about. But IMO the killer feature is the "all messages" view that merges chosen streams in mo…

> The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about.

Does anyone have experience how this compares to the threading in Flowdock? I like their threading the best between the ones I've tried, but it doesn't allow you to skip or hide threads that aren't useful to you.

I'm still somewhat baffled by Slack's popularity as it's almost as bad as IRC on larger groups.

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

#62

Post by eksmast »

haffla wrote: post #57

Zulip is using Python and Postgresql. Is this a great choice of stack for a chat app? I'd love to know how Zulip performs with hundreds of concurrent users. I am currently looking into Rocket.Chat which is based on Meteor (NodeJS) and MongoDB, a stack which, for me, seems better suited for this kind of app. But hey, I don't know, I haven't done performance tests or anything. Does anyone know about any hard limits wit…

If you care to login, there is a thread on zulip here https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/2-general/subject/Scal...

regarding scaling.

Relevant info- Zulip is designed for ~15k users with real-world tests of 3k users. Not sure about concurrent users.

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

#63

Post by SXX »

If someone tried to do it how easy is it to add to Zulip login with 3rd-party SSO server like Discourse?

Want to find alternative to Slack for open source project since restricting they apply getting annoying and it's would be nice to have single point of registration after all.

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

#64

Post by web007 »

haffla wrote: post #57

Zulip is using Python and Postgresql. Is this a great choice of stack for a chat app? I'd love to know how Zulip performs with hundreds of concurrent users. I am currently looking into Rocket.Chat which is based on Meteor (NodeJS) and MongoDB, a stack which, for me, seems better suited for this kind of app. But hey, I don't know, I haven't done performance tests or anything. Does anyone know about any hard limits wit…

We tried RocketChat for about a day before switching to Mattermost. It wasn't great, but worked okay for a team of 20-30.

After a month or so of mumbling and grumbling on MM we went to Zulip, and brought on another dozen or so designers and PMs. Zulip lasted about 6 months before management implemented Slack company-wide and rolled out for the other 100 sales and support teams.

Zulip was the best for engineering, by far, but it was doomed from the start because the UX wasn't as simplified and polished as Slack. It didn't Just Work, you had to think and use it properly to see the benefits.

Back to your question: no limits I know of, and a t2.medium was 90% idle for an active team up to ~50 without a hitch. I think the docs (or launch announcement?) mentioned a large deployment around 1k, but I can't remember the details. You'll definitely want to test your expected configs and hardware to be confident.

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

#65

Post by tabbott »

haffla wrote: post #57

Zulip is using Python and Postgresql. Is this a great choice of stack for a chat app? I'd love to know how Zulip performs with hundreds of concurrent users. I am currently looking into Rocket.Chat which is based on Meteor (NodeJS) and MongoDB, a stack which, for me, seems better suited for this kind of app. But hey, I don't know, I haven't done performance tests or anything. Does anyone know about any hard limits wit…

We've been extremely happy with the Python 3 (with mypy static types) and Postgres stack. Like with any app, you need to take some care to design the database model right and avoid database queries in loops. But with our design, all the expensive operations are done in the database and cache, so Python is just as fast as anything else. And because our data model design and indexes are correct and Postgres is awesome, the database queries are all fast. We use Postgres' built-in full-text search, and people frequently praise Zulip's search as being unusually good for finding past conversations.

For Zulip's scalability, see https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/maintain-s...

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

#66

Post by tabbott »

SXX wrote: post #63

If someone tried to do it how easy is it to add to Zulip login with 3rd-party SSO server like Discourse? Want to find alternative to Slack for open source project since restricting they apply getting annoying and it's would be nice to have single point of registration after all.

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.

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

#67

Post by dmitriid »

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/…

That one single screenshot shows... a chat I presume? Which looks marginally worse than Slack.

I couldn't care less for any other links, because they: are on some other sites that you assume are discoverable by magic.

Now imagine a person who has used Slack, and has never seen your app in their life. They arrive at your landing page. What are the incentives for such a person to download the app? Generic marketing-speak?

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

#68

Post by tabbott »

icc97 wrote: post #54
donaldguy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could alternatively OAuth sign up for the chat.zulip.org server used for project development and see the feature in action there ( https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/chat-zul... ) so long as you kept testing traffic to the `#test here` stream :-)

Minor niggle - but I don't understand you and the github readme point to readthedocs rather than just 'show me the money' of https://chat.zulip.org/ Perhaps you want to give more context, but I did nothing on the readthedocs page other than look for the link.

We used to do that, but it turns out that having the Internet visit your chat community without any briefing isn't the best plan. Linking to the ReadTheDocs page has helped a lot in making sure people joining the community have some sense as to what to expect (e.g. that it's at times running a super beta version of Zulip, or that people are doing actual work, that we have a code of conduct, and you should send your test messages to #test here).

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

#69

Post by SXX »

tabbott wrote: post #66
SXX wrote: post #63

If someone tried to do it how easy is it to add to Zulip login with 3rd-party SSO server like Discourse? Want to find alternative to Slack for open source project since restricting they apply getting annoying and it's would be nice to have single point of registration after all.

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.

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

#70

Post by ciupicri »

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.

"Log in with GitHub" didn't work for me. GitHub asked me to authorize Zulip then nothing happened, I can't login.
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