[HN Gopher] Zulip 7.0: Threaded open-source team chat
___________________________________________________________________
Zulip 7.0: Threaded open-source team chat
Author : mikece
Score : 133 points
Date : 2023-05-31 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.zulip.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.zulip.com)
| [deleted]
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Lots of nice UI and UX improvements, great to see.
|
| I hope
|
| > we've started a prototype of a next-generation Zulip mobile app
| in Flutter
|
| means that the same will happen to the mobile app - it's badly in
| need of a UI reboot.
| wrycoder wrote:
| What is the difference between using Zulip threads for topic
| discussions vs. using Discourse, with its categories?
| pjerem wrote:
| The big Zulip feature, IMO, is that you can easily reorganize
| topics afterwards.
|
| It's not like in a forum where you create a topic and then get
| answers (although you can).
|
| It's more like a chat conversation that you can group and label
| once you detect it have its own topic.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Yes; if you've ever wanted to go back in time and create a
| new thread for an e-mail topic, you will understand what I
| like so much about Zulip.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > _" The biggest news for this release is that Zulip is midway
| through a major visual redesign. The redesign is intended to give
| the app a clean, modern look, while preserving and enhancing
| Zulip's highly efficient interaction design"_
|
| The design of Zulip is often talked about.
|
| They are making it a major focus to improve.
|
| You can see the redesign at the link below (no account needed).
|
| https://chat.zulip.org
| aidenn0 wrote:
| ... I hate the redesign, which probably means everybody but me
| will love it. Maybe I'm just old, but "clean, modern look"
| always seems to translate to "harder to figure out how to
| interact with it" for me.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Have you looked at the redesign.
|
| It wouldn't characterize it as "clean, modern look" even
| though the blog calls it that.
|
| It's say it's much more accessible / clear.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm balancing the fact that it's not as bad as I expected
| with the fact that it's only halfway done... Maybe I'm
| being overly cynical.
| seanieb wrote:
| Love Zulip. It's such a well developed and mature project. I
| can't believe it's not eating Slacks lunch.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > It's such a well developed and mature project. I can't
| believe it's not eating Slacks lunch.
|
| Zulip was acquired by Dropbox before it was publicly available,
| and then after a few years Dropbox spun it out into an
| independent OSS project.
|
| It's kind of unfortunate that Dropbox never really gave Zulip a
| chance, because that was _just_ before Slack became successful.
| Zulip as a product is way better than Slack and could have
| either "won" or influenced Slack and competitors to adopt a
| better conversation model.
|
| Of course, nothing is stopping that from happening today, but
| by the time Zulip was refounded and regained momentum, several
| critical years had passed in between and Slack was much further
| ahead in market share.
|
| Having used Zulip, Slack is now literally painful to use,
| especially at scale.
| rocmcd wrote:
| I didn't know Zulip was acquired by Dropbox! Thanks for the
| info.
|
| It's interesting to imagine a timeline where Dropbox becomes
| a leading business/collaboration tool, similar to GSuite or
| MS Office. It seems like they had many of the right pieces,
| between storage, paper, zulip... If they had added email and
| calendar plus potentially their own presentation and
| spreadsheet tools they could be have been a contender instead
| of relegated to pretty just storage at this point.
| price wrote:
| That was in fact Dropbox's plan circa 2013-2014. (I worked
| there 2014-2017.) In fact they had email too: Mailbox, a
| mobile mail client with some brilliant product ideas, which
| marked the start of the acquisitions spree that included
| Zulip as well as Hackpad (which became Paper) and many
| small others.
|
| It didn't work out. Some of the reasons are in this Casey
| Newton article:
| https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-
| mailb...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That article claims that swiping to delete/archive
| messages debuted in Mailbox, but I recall doing that in
| 2009 with the Palm Pre's builtin mail app.
| price wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| My perception in 2014 was right in line with the way it's
| told in that 2015 article: that this was a new and clever
| UI twist, one that I hadn't seen before and that many
| people in the industry were copying after seeing it in
| Mailbox. That was as an engineer in San Francisco,
| talking with designers and product folks and people much
| more plugged in to industry gossip than me - so I think
| that means it truly had not previously existed in the
| mobile apps (really, the iPhone apps) that people here
| who were connected were paying attention to.
|
| It sounds like Palm had the feature years earlier. Maybe
| the Mailbox folks got the idea from there! In any case I
| think they did succeed in bringing the feature to a lot
| more users, by making it something that people in the
| industry widely knew about and copied.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's also possible I'm misremembering, but I'm about 90%
| certain since I remember I would do a pass through my
| inbox on my phone because of how quick and easy it was to
| sort this way.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I haven't used zulip, especially at a workplace, but the
| thing that Slack does so much better than everything else
| I've tried, is search.
|
| How is Zulip for search for large orgs with millions of
| messages? Discord doesn't hold a candle to Slack.
|
| For context, I'm not talking just about the ease and speed of
| searches, but also about the support for basic filters, exact
| phrase searching (Discord doesn't have this) or bypassing
| fuzzy search (Discord always fuzzy searches on the individual
| words of your search words)
| nh2 wrote:
| I wondered this too.
|
| Just tried it on https://chat.zulip.org:
|
| So far, it seems it doesn't support exact phrase search:
| Searching for "what" with our without quotes produces no
| results. Slack finds the results.
|
| Searching for `"option"` in quotes also finds `options`, so
| I'm not sure if exact, non-fuzzy search is possible.
|
| https://zulip.com/help/search-for-messages suggests that
| there is no support for exact-search or case-sensitive
| search.
| revskill wrote:
| By reading this blog post, it's easy to understand why.
|
| No screenshots for new readers to actually see what's the UI
| look like, what's the UX look like, what's other feature look
| like VISUALLY.
|
| Why taking too much words ? Remember one golden rule in
| marketing: One picture worths 1000 words.
| dabber21 wrote:
| https://chat.zulip.org/
| nxpnsv wrote:
| true but look at their main page: https://zulip.com it is
| pretty good at showing zulip
| madars wrote:
| Looks like blog is about the diff between 6.0 and 7.0; see
| https://zulip.com/ for screenshots. BTW, threaded
| conversations (called "instances" in Zephyr
| https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/zephyr/, which Zulip's model is
| inspired by) are infinitely better than anything
| Discord/Slack/IRC have to offer and greatly contribute to
| discussion culture: it is considered a faux pas to not switch
| an instance when conversation topic changes, so you can
| easily narrow in on the entirety of a conversation even if a
| number different conversations are happening at the same
| time.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Glad they are working on it. I've been using it recently on a
| couple of my projects and hugely prefer it to slack. The new user
| experience was a little rough on the previous version (somebody
| thought "stream events" was an acceptable default topic name, for
| example, which would show up under all of your channels) but for
| the most part once over the hump most people seem good with it.
| [deleted]
| majkinetor wrote:
| Very nice.
|
| We use Mattermost. Its great, but you really get lost in topics
| quickly and its hard to follow them. Especially with bots that
| you can't remove from conversation when you need it. We also had
| to mumbo jumbo LDAP support via GitLab which is suboptimal and
| there seems to be no way to remove users forever from it, only
| deactivate them.
|
| The threads here look very nice and entire thing reminds on
| forum/email conversation. With free LDAP and AIM support I am
| certainly going to take a deep look.
| mikecoles wrote:
| I've used Zulip in the past. Very nice software. At the time
| (they still may), push notifications were supported for self-
| hosted servers. It was a joy to use the software.
| stavros wrote:
| Zulip makes keeping track of threads a breeze, you can
| basically create a feed of only the topics you want to see (you
| mute others) and you zoom in to a single topic to read all of
| it, or zoom out to see it interleaved in the chronological
| timeline of all messages in the company. It's fantastic because
| you can never get lost.
| ezst wrote:
| I'm glad that zulip exists, though I was only mildly impressed by
| its threading model. The complexity of dealing with threads
| doesn't magically disappears with it, instead of specific
| discussions being organized as one-off sub-channels or as
| unlabeled chains of cited/related messages like on other
| protocols, you end up with channels followed by their seemingly
| infinite list of short lived topics turned clutter after a while.
| That does help delineate threads compared to e.g. slack (which
| everyone agrees is the worst in this area) but it just feels (to
| me) like reading more channels (because the "main" one is no
| loger practical as a "common"/"neutral" place).
|
| I think I'm just old school and prefer the raw simplicity of
| things like IRC where there is no assumption of threading: you'd
| just go about quoting exactly what you want to respond to, which
| is just enough context to connect the dots. IMHO there's no
| silver bullet: all the alternatives have their pros and cons and
| there's universal value in simplicity.
| 2023throwawayy wrote:
| Zulip is a fantastic product, and they provide free service for
| open source projects.
|
| With their (somewhat new) public server feature, the chat is
| available for browsing without needing an account first.
|
| I strongly urge any open source project using Discord or Slack as
| their chat, to give Zulip a real shot.
| pentagrama wrote:
| The feature of browse without having an account is great, it
| will be great for WordPress who uses Slack. I remember reading
| some articles about WordPress in the site WP Tavern who
| mentioned some sources as "announced on the WordPress Slack",
| with Zulip everyone will be able to link those announcements.
| stavros wrote:
| Agreed, Zulip is by far the best chat experience I've had for
| when I need to get stuff done. The ease with which you can keep
| track of threads in it is amazing.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| I wanted to move the company chat from Rocket to Zulip but had
| some problems with the importer. I heard they improved it but
| haven't tried since.
| tabbott wrote:
| We're very happy to help debug that sort of thing in the Zulip
| development community: https://zulip.com/development-
| community/. Unfortunately, basically no modern team chat
| product provides satisfactory documentation of their data
| export format (E.g. Rocket.Chat is just a MongoDB database
| dump). I don't blame them -- all the data of your instance is a
| pretty complex thing to document, tends to change often, and
| doesn't get a ton of use to motivate investing hundreds of
| hours into writing and maintaining good documentation for it.
|
| But it does mean the quality of import tools is limited by how
| many people have run it and reported all the issues they ran
| into so that we can fix them. It is not uncommon for our data
| import tools to need to work around things that are essentially
| data corruption in the original database.
|
| Our Rocket.Chat import tool was indeed improved greatly in 6.0
| last November thanks to a user with a very large and old
| Rocket.Chat instance submitting a very helpful pull request
| last Fall, so you may have better luck if you try again now.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Does anybody know a cheap way to self-host a Zulip instance with
| ~200 users?
|
| I've looked at cloud vm offerings but they all seem fairly steep
| for the Zulip hardware requirements (especially the RAM).
|
| https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/requiremen...
| andybak wrote:
| Recently spent over a day trialing and configuring Zulip to
| discover that opening the forum to the public doesn't mean it's
| indexed by search engines.
|
| If your community content isn't indexed then in many cases it
| might as well not exist. The open web is based on linking and
| indexing (Google's current search monopoly aside)
| tabbott wrote:
| You can do search engine indexing via
| https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive; it defaults to
| archiving your public access streams.
|
| We will eventually support search engine indexing without the
| extra overhead of running a separate archive tool (likely as an
| organization-level settings checkbox, since not everyone who
| wants public access wants search engine indexing).
| kyleee wrote:
| That GitHub URL got malformed, there is a semicolon appended
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-31 23:01 UTC)