81–90 of 134 posts
Is Dropbox still involved with this at all? It surprises me that Dropbox didn't integrate Zulip better, or combine it with Dropbox, Paper etc.. to create some kind of G Suite competitor.
Dropbox is not involved with Zulip. I'm not sure we've ever posted a good canonical write-up of that story, but here's a version I wrote a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629329
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Dropbox is not involved with Zulip. I'm not sure we've ever posted a good canonical write-up of that story, but here's a version I wrote a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629329
Thanks for the background. So it sounds like Zulip was purely an acquihire.
Portions of Zulip's backend were used to power some Dropbox features in 2014-16, but the product itself wasn't further integrated.
In any case, I'm proud of how we handled the handoff to OSS and a sustainable independent stewardship org. I have https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/146708555778/zu... framed on my wall.
My personal favorite thing about Zulip is the keyboard navigation and how much muscle memory you can build moving around threads/conversations. Of course there's also the actual markdown (not some weird variant).
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Oh, yes, the UI is fantastic in how it handles this, but I was describing the general data structure. Some people had trouble grasping the mental model initially, and I found thinking of it in those terms helpful for figuring out what's going on.
Part of the reason I brought this up was that this is roughly how Zulip was first described to me, and my experience with threads in Slack made that sound really unappealing , which led me to avoid trying Zulip for quite some time. Once I finally tried it, it was completely different than I expected, and much better.
https://medium.com/slack-design/threads-in-slack-a-long-desi...
Of course, people here have self-selected for favoring threads, but Slack's attention to the silent negatives is interesting and a lesson in product design.
Zulip has been absolutely pivotal in our company's remote work setup. It becomes a searchable knolwledgebase as a side-effect of its threading model (the exact opposite of the pile of unorganized mess that Slack usually devolves into): https://monadical.com/posts/how-to-make-remote-work-part-two...
I found Slack's design discussion on how they decided for single-depth threads interesting. There's a balance to strike between powerful features and usability. https://medium.com/slack-design/threads-in-slack-a-long-desi... Of course, people here have self-selected for favoring threads, but Slack's attention to the silent negatives is interesting and a lesson in product design.
In their testing, it does not seem like they prototyped an N-nested (indented) threading model like on Reddit or HN. I am not surprised that it would be hard to understand how all the replies fit together without such nesting.
Threads are one major reason I like Zulip over Slack, but speed is another. I usually have two different instances open on my browser with no problems, and one of them has dozens of conversations going on at once. Zulip is also one of the only apps I put on my iPhone, and it's straightforward and unobtrusive. For some reason when I use Slack, the keys feel mushy. I think they're doing so much stuff in the background…
They are the primary reason to use Zulip. In this way, Zulip is more of a Teams competitor than it is a Slack competitor. I, frankly, cannot stand threads. I want a chat room, not a realtime forum. I understand why people would like that, but it still bothers the shit out of me. I work for MS so we have to use Teams, but I'd prefer opt-in to threads vs. threads by default. I fully understand and accept that my way is…
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Zulip integrates with Jitsi Meet, so the video call button generates a unique Jitsi meeting link which everyone can join without installing anything or making an account.
Also, new in this release: BigBlueButton (another OSS video/call project). This release removes Google Hangouts support (as Google killed it and rebranded it to Google Meet). Unfortunately, the Google Meet rebrand came with removing the API that was useful for third party tools like Zulip. I don't understand why they don't provide the brilliant API Jitsi has where you can just generate a URL containing a random meeti…