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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

#91

Post by IshKebab »

jsiepkes wrote: post #35
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…

Same here. We're a company with about 50 people and deal with a lot of operational chatter. The threading model of Zulip works really great for us. Before Zulip we used XMPP for a long time, then Mattermost for a short time (the threading model in mattermost didnt work at all for us), then moved to Zulip and never looked back. I definitely recommend Zulip.

How does it's threading differ from Slack's?

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

#92

Post by ciupicri »

fipple wrote: post #82
ciupicri wrote: post #80

The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke. > You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements. So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some deb packages. There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what…

This comment is a great illustration of why companies and investors prefer software as a service business models wherever possible.

I think that people who want software as a service, are probably happy with running the install script on Ubuntu and just treating everything as a black box.

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

#93

Post by ciupicri »

andybak wrote: post #86
fipple wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is a great illustration of why companies and investors prefer software as a service business models wherever possible.

When there are so many options for one-click repeatable deployments of complex stacks that strikes me as an overreaction. I recently had to test a complex Django-based Document Management System: https://www.mayan-edms.com/ The install was a breeze. Even with very little experience with Docker it took me a matter of minutes to fire up a Digital Ocean droplet, paste in a few commands and have a fully working install.…

The install was a breeze because you practically installed a self contained black box. What if you wanted to use Apache instead of nginx or a custom compiled Python interpreter or PyPy?

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

#94

Post by shadowfiend »

distances wrote: post #77
rendaw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As news about Slack becomes fewer and farther in-between, reminders of how much more usable Flowdock was also fade from view. I'm left with a dead emptiness in my heart and a general pessimism about corporate communications. Is there _any_ service with Flowdock style threading now? XMPP clients? Game chats?

I guess it's obvious but Flowdock itself is alive and under active development.

Unfortunately they've taken a left turn on the quality front, at least for the iOS app. It was unmaintained and slightly buggy, but then it became maintained and slow, power-hungry, and extra-buggy, and new versions usually don't make it better. At least the macOS desktop app is still based on WebKit rather than Electron, so it doesn't guzzle battery.

They've added some handy features, and there are more in the pipeline, but the current mobile experience is so bad that I'm having trouble not looking at alternatives. This despite the threading and content model (inbox divorced from chat is amazing) that has kept me very loyal for a very long time.

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

#95

Post by dorfsmay »

IshKebab wrote: post #91
jsiepkes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. We're a company with about 50 people and deal with a lot of operational chatter. The threading model of Zulip works really great for us. Before Zulip we used XMPP for a long time, then Mattermost for a short time (the threading model in mattermost didnt work at all for us), then moved to Zulip and never looked back. I definitely recommend Zulip.

How does it's threading differ from Slack's?

It creates separate horizontal blocks that feel natura, as opposed to the weird vertical windows in slack.

It also supports markdown.

You can try it at chat.zulip.org

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

#96

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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…

Python fits very well this use-case. If you design a chat app properly you should be doing very little computation. With Python's async you can scale up to large number of sessions / users / channels without issues.

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

#97

Post by needle0 »

When viewing the page on a Japanese Mac, the letter sequence "am" within "Open source team chat" is incorrectly displayed as a single-character "A.M." symbol. It appears the CSS is specifying "'dlig' 1" for the H tags - 'dlig' stands for Discretionary Ligatures, which triggers all sorts of weird inadvertent ligatures and should be used, as its name shows, with discretion. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1j6vywsfycm6r4m/dlig.png?dl=0

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

#98

Post by heavenlyhash »

fipple wrote: post #82
ciupicri wrote: post #80

The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke. > You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements. So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some deb packages. There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what…

This comment is a great illustration of why companies and investors prefer software as a service business models wherever possible.

This strikes me as ironic, because Zulip started as a SaaS project. Much of the current cruftiness perceived in the install process is likely because earlier generations of the Zulip codebase were written with the presumption of developers in the same team being the ones deploying it.

SaaS itself is the cancer killing usable software installations, not the other way around, IMO.

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

#99

Post by saghul »

ciupicri wrote: post #80

The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke. > You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements. So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some deb packages. There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what…

I see Docker / your container tech of choice as a solution to this. Your server can still run whatever distro, and a specific app can run a different one.

This can be annoying from the sysadmin perspective, since there are now multiple operating systems to take care of, but at the same time, the developer may not be able to produce builds for all distros their users would like.

Ubuntu is a fine choice IMHO, given the above. But yeah, some debs / ppa would be nice.

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