[HN Gopher] Zulip.com Values
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Zulip.com Values
Author : nothrowaways
Score : 257 points
Date : 2026-02-10 00:46 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zulip.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zulip.com)
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| As nice as zulips aspirations may be, every time i have to use it
| for a community i effectively stop interacting with them after a
| short while just because everything is janky, ugly and feels like
| a drag to interact with, just tried opening it on my phone to see
| if it improved but the header ui is just plain broken.
| terpimost wrote:
| Could you explain please what exactly is broken? How is it jot
| working and what are your particular expectations?
| a3w wrote:
| My perspective:
|
| I have looked at the rust Zulip forums, which are bulky. But
| with moderation and rules and having people on the autistic
| spectrum [citation needed], it perhaps is usable for large
| organizations. Just kidding.
|
| We are using Zulip for 300+ members in a makerspace, and at
| 40 members, we were not happy. Scaling to 300 never broke not
| being happy, since we all hate the UI ever since.
|
| I cannot re-open Zulip threads, which are also issues with an
| atomic "solved/unresolved" state, unless I have elevated
| access. It is not a true forum like PHP forums, where we ask
| people to name threads, and you might just skip reading more
| than the title, or locate interesting threads by activity and
| find stickies about important announcements in a pull, not
| push, way of doing things.
|
| It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open,
| and no once wants to read any of them.
|
| If they wanted to re-invent forums, they should have cloned
| the "discourse" web app/forum. Still looks like shit on every
| platform, mobile or desktop, but at least does not break down
| on mobile.
| alyandon wrote:
| It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open,
| and no once wants to read any of them.
|
| I really wanted to like Zulip and use it as a personal chat
| service for a small group and it was exactly that feature
| that made it basically unsuitable. Forcing everything into
| titled threads did not make any sense for lots of user to
| user interactions that are ad-hoc in nature.
|
| I didn't think it was terrible software by any stretch of
| the imagination - just not really suitable for informal
| communication.
| neonshankster wrote:
| > If they wanted to re-invent forums, they should have
| cloned the "discourse" web app/forum.
|
| Zulip was founded in 2012, Discourse was released in 2014.
| ssivark wrote:
| > _It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are
| open, and no once wants to read any of them._
|
| Do you mean people are happy to post on a thousand
| different threads, but no one reads posts from anyone else?
|
| Why do you even have so many different active threads? Why
| not just let "resolved" threads be, and funnel
| conversations into fewer threads? (esp if you want
| ephemerality i.e. conversations to expire with time)
|
| > _300+ members in a makerspace_
|
| If you have 300+ people discussing a wide variety of
| things, how do you ever expect to maintain your sanity with
| only channels and without threads? Won't every channel be
| quickly flooded and really hard to resurface anything
| useful from past discussions?
|
| > _I cannot [...] unless I have elevated access_
|
| Is your complaint that your Zulip space is not moderated
| well and that it would be helpful to ad-hoc decentralize
| some of the maintenance work across more participants?
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| there are just so many issues, where do i start? its just
| apparent no designer or usability person ever used it or was
| involved in anything for this project. there is a weird
| search button with uncentered icon, scrolling makes some
| tooltip flicker and partially scroll on top of the header,
| the content of the page reappears on the top of the header
| when scrolling past it. everything just feels like one giant
| glitch. and when you scroll, there is a focus outline around
| whatever item you happened to drag the scroll area with. This
| is what i encountered in 5 seconds testing just opening and
| scrolling up and down.
| tabbott wrote:
| I encourage you to stop by and report things with
| screenshots/screencasts so we can get these fixed.
|
| We were able to reproduce the search icon centering issue
| in mobile web, which is being fixed here:
|
| https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/channel/9-issues/topic/cente
| r...
| lincolnq wrote:
| I've spent a bit of time last year trying to convey my
| product instincts to the Zulip team and mostly stopped
| because I felt like they didn't care enough / weren't moving
| very fast. The basic problem is that the mobile app is, like
| it or not, the way most people will use the product, and it
| needs to be designed by an opinionated person who actually
| will say no to things.
|
| In my view, the home page should be just like a proper
| messaging app: show every recent thread ("topic" in Zulip
| nomenclature) that I'm involved in, across all my channels,
| with unread ones indicated using a 'dot'. Or, if you really
| want to be like Slack, just copy Slack more directly. In
| either case, the other views (Inbox, Combined Feed, DMs, etc)
| should be under menus, not primary actions.
|
| The other thing is that it's often hard to figure out how to
| reply to a topic. In the Combined Feed, which is my preferred
| view for consuming updates, the UX for replying sucks --
| first you have to figure out to tap the headers; and even
| then, you can accidentally tap into a channel instead of a
| topic. It's extremely non obvious when you've done this and
| constantly causes people to reply in the wrong topic.
|
| I vibecoded some improved Inbox UX using Claude Code and I
| think it would be a big step up, but it's hard to know what
| the steps would be to get it shipped, since I don't have time
| to spin up properly on the codebase and I doubt my changes
| are acceptable as-is. If Zulip team wants them I'd happily
| share though.
| kreetx wrote:
| While I haven't used zulip recently, then a few years ago that
| was my experience as well.
| tabbott wrote:
| For what it's worth, essentially every main view surface was
| visually redesigned over the course of the last 2 years. So
| while I can't promise you'll like the new design, it
| certainly isn't the same as it was 2 years ago.
|
| One of the other nice features of the new design
| implementation is there are handy settings for font size and
| line spacing. It turns out that different people have very
| different desires for how dense content is in chat apps, and
| empirically there's a significant portion of users with just
| about every combination.
| tabbott wrote:
| Are you using iOS? Safari 26 has several changes that break the
| mobile web app layout, and it's proven quite difficult to fix.
| I'd suggest using the actual mobile app on iOS if you've
| upgraded to Safari 26.
|
| (My understanding is we are far from the only web app broken by
| Safari 26, and we're working on it).
| thekoma wrote:
| What companies value can change after they've grabbed their
| share. Just like how OpenAI changed their "constitution" about
| working with others.
|
| I wish there was a way to hold companies accountable for stuff
| like that.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Zulip being fully open-source and self-hostable helps this.
| It's what the Bluesky team have been calling "credible exit",
| and Zulip has it way more than Bluesky does.
|
| On the other hand, I would love to see more tech companies
| being co-operatives, where their members get a say in
| governance. That'd be the ultimate hard-mode for a business
| that was dedicated to being rugpull-resistant.
| boramalper wrote:
| Agree on wanting to see more tech companies being
| cooperatives but not sure what you mean by this:
|
| > That'd be the ultimate hard-mode for a business that was
| dedicated to being rugpull-resistant.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Being a cooperative seems (having never run one) harder
| than being a regular private company. It seems like it
| would constrain a business from being able to do what it
| would otherwise want to do. So I think of it as doing
| business "on hard mode". I think it's socially worth doing,
| and I aspire to be part of one someday. But I don't think
| it comes for free, especially in a market where you'll
| compete with businesses that aren't also playing on hard
| mode.
| boramalper wrote:
| I see, I agree with it too. I think that's why many tech
| projects prefer a "private company owned by a non-profit
| foundation" structure such as Mozilla and Signal as the
| examples off the top of my head.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I've started working at a company that uses Zulip and it's by far
| the best thought out UX I've ever worked with in a communications
| app. Sure there's some polish needed but the general structure
| just lets me get to where I want, gives me an overview of
| everything going on, and generally makes me happy. I wish for
| more keyboard shortcuts maybe, and the mobile app needs the
| recent conversations view, but I'm sure they'll get there.
| simonmales wrote:
| Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an initial
| shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things'.
|
| The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I argue
| that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some getting used
| it.
|
| As mentioned, Slack is way more polished.
| trueno wrote:
| > The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I
| argue that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some
| getting used
|
| I personally can't stand it. _However_ I just learned today
| that it can actually be disabled, which I would do if I was
| deploying a zulip instance for my team. We are all very wired
| towards the crackhead energy of just.. a chronological chat
| and a competent search.
| andersa wrote:
| You can just not specify a topic and write your messages in
| "general chat", nothing stops you from doing this.
| trueno wrote:
| we want topics allowed in certain channels only (ie
| #announcements) so that's probably what we'll use this
| feature for which certainly was not there when we tested
| maybe a year ago or so
| tabbott wrote:
| The nice general chat UI and per-channel permissions for
| it were new in Zulip 11.0 last year:
| https://blog.zulip.com/2025/08/13/zulip-11-0-released/.
| So probably you tested not long before this got built.
| dizhn wrote:
| That's new.
| andersa wrote:
| True, though even before this we just made a chatting
| topic with the name "general", that worked just fine
| while still letting people make other threads for long
| discussions.
| ssivark wrote:
| > _Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an
| initial shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things'
| [...] takes some getting used it._
|
| I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others
| love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a
| sibling thread.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960569
|
| Curious to hear what you think.
| ssivark wrote:
| > recent conversations
|
| I wish Zulip (and other apps) provided an _inbox_ instead of
| just ephemeral notifications that disappear once a message is
| viewed. Lack of inbox means that I have to use unread messages
| as a way to manage my inbox -- because the moment I click on a
| notification / take a quick peek at a message there's no easy
| way to mark it for _coming back to later_.
|
| ----
|
| +100 for Zulip though; by far the sanest messaging experience
| for this kind of context.
| terpimost wrote:
| There is an Inbox view which you can make a default. You can
| also turn on setting to not mark messages as read
| automatically
| Semaphor wrote:
| I just had a look. I can absolutely understand parent. I'd
| want an option to include read messages in the inbox, not
| avoid marking as read. I want a history of stuff in my
| inbox, the same way discord, my RSS reader, and my email
| client work. All those have a read and unread state, but I
| can still see the read ones.
| tabbott wrote:
| You may be looking for the recent view
| (https://zulip.com/help/recent-conversations) which you
| can also set to be the default/home view for your
| account.
|
| (And administrators can set it to be the default for new
| users in their organization, if the way your organization
| communicates is such that it's a better default than
| inbox).
| KPGv2 wrote:
| I heavily use Discord for fan works stuff (I run some major
| annual fan works projects, like a big bang, charity
| fundraiser, zine, etc.).
|
| That's how I know Discord has this feature! Top right corner
| has an @ and it's the "mentions", which is a list of every
| notification. I couldn't do all the managerial/administrative
| work on these projects without it.
| tabbott wrote:
| Another feature you can use in Zulip for this workflow is
| starred messages; just star messages that are not done, and
| then you can browse the starred messages view when you've got
| some time to follow up on things.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Replying to myself because I'm sure someone from Zulip will
| read this thread: I also wish for a tiered channel system.
| Instead of muting some, I'd like to promote some to high
| priority, so my inbox can toggle between the ones I really care
| about and a general overview.
| neonshankster wrote:
| You can "pin" channels. It puts them at the top of the
| sidebar as well as the inbox. You can also use a variety of
| filters in the inbox.
| alya wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I think feature closest to what
| you're requesting is followed topics
| (https://zulip.com/help/follow-a-topic), which you can filter
| to in the inbox. Perhaps we could add an option to auto-
| follow topics in a specific channel to other ways of auto-
| following topics.
| trueno wrote:
| was just chattin zulip in another thread. news to me that there
| is a setting for disabling topics which puts thing in a normal
| "chat room" style chronological order though it looks like it
| still retains some sort of topic visual heading which looks
| kind of noisy.
|
| zulip is the most solid of the open self hosted solutions so
| far imo. last my team tried it sometime a year ago maybe we
| were super turned off at the threaded topics. my entire team
| hates them and anyone trying to post important stuff in topics
| gets ignored lol we can't help it our brains just don't want
| them in our lives.
|
| but now seeing that there's a way to disable that, it's
| possibly time to revisit zulip
| krapht wrote:
| Why not have a megatopic for things that don't need their own
| topic?
|
| Topics are necessary when you start having a huge Zulip
| server, 100+ people. There's so much noise --- dividing
| things by channel is too coarse.
|
| I participate in several open source Zulip servers and it
| reminds me of a better IRC. It's a lot more ergonomic that
| Gitter or Discord.
| ssivark wrote:
| Topics are otherwise incredibly useful even with a small
| number of people, if you want to carry out parallel & wide-
| ranging conversations on different timescales. Implicitly
| designing for a single topic per channel forces chats to be
| ephemeral and makes it very hard to have long timescale
| discussions.
|
| Eg. If I'm discussing buying a house or a career change
| (personal) or a new business strategy for my company (work)
| I don't want all conversations dumped into a single river.
| Slack's model of threads within a channel feels too
| schizophrenic; Zulip's model of multiple conversations
| arranged loosely by theme (and accessible from the sidebar)
| is much better.
|
| Catch-all topics are good for the ephemeral stream of
| chatter.
|
| Some might say that chat should be only for ephemeral
| stuff, but then that is basically avoiding the essential
| complexity (of long term conversations) which must live
| _somewhere_ to enforce some Procrustean simplicity on the
| chat platform.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| My frustration with the flow, is that you're forcing me to
| make a decision at a point where I don't really know if a
| thought/idea/comment I want to share will rise to the level
| of warranting the organizational overhead of making it a
| "topic" vs just a little toe in the main stream.
| wrs wrote:
| I haven't used Zulip in a while, but can't you reorganize
| messages/topics after posting? I remember that as being
| one of the biggest advantages over Slack for exactly this
| reason (the Slack equivalent is "I wish I'd known to
| reply in a thread, because oops, this topic took over the
| channel").
| fragmede wrote:
| > my entire team hates them
|
| Fascinating! Can you explain why?
| ssivark wrote:
| > _my entire team hates them and anyone trying to post
| important stuff in topics gets ignored lol we can 't help it
| our brains just don't want them in our lives._
|
| I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others
| love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a
| sibling thread.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960569
|
| Curious to hear what you think.
| tabbott wrote:
| Bringing the recent conversations view for mobile is one of our
| main goals for next couple months!
| notenlish wrote:
| hopefully zulip can become a slack/discord alternative
| crabmusket wrote:
| It already is!
|
| (EDIT: unless your reason for using Discord is PTT voice
| channels. Then it's not.)
| prmoustache wrote:
| OTOH you can always setup jitsi integration to let your users
| hop on a jitsi voice call. Or advertise a mumble server.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Sure, but I think this article makes a good point: there's
| a demographic that uses voice chat as more of a space, not
| an event: https://sporks.space/2026/02/10/a-few-design-
| decisions-for-a...
| prmoustache wrote:
| I have been reusing the same jitsi "room" with my family
| for several months.
| estearum wrote:
| Needs significant UI polish IMO. Anyone from the Zulip team
| care to chime in if there's appetite for this? I could take a
| look at contributing if so. Just the project getting to this
| level of maturity _without_ significant polish sort of triggers
| the "maybe maintained by people who just don't value it that
| much" alarms?
| nnevatie wrote:
| Everyone has values, until they get punched with a billion dollar
| check.
| blitzar wrote:
| Now we're just haggling over the price.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Almost _every_ person has his price.
| gilrain wrote:
| It's a lot easier to keep your values when you aren't
| _literally_ waiting for and counting on the billion dollar
| check, though.
| brightball wrote:
| I've run the Carolina Code Conference since 2023 and we've setup
| Zulip as a chat system for conference attendees to network every
| year. It's a really cool platform and I wish it had more
| widespread adoption.
| GZGavinZhao wrote:
| UI and user ergonomics continues to be Zulip's biggest blocker to
| wider adoption. I understand that to many people not having E2EE
| and truly independent self hosting (e.g. push notification
| issues) is a deal breaker, but for many organizations the current
| level of openness from its values is enough.
|
| I really wish Zulip could find someone to re-design the interface
| around the channels/threads model to make it easier to use and
| more friendly to beginners. I am personally never bothered by the
| design and got used to its interface quite quickly, but I know
| many many people who got turned away by its design or uses it in
| a Slack/Discord way by posting everything into "general chat".
| solarkraft wrote:
| I am one of these people. I remember liking the concept a lot,
| but just couldn't stand wading through the UI (or telling
| anyone else that I expect them to).
| ssivark wrote:
| > _UI and user ergonomics continues to be Zulip 's biggest
| blocker to wider adoption [...] many people who got turned away
| by its design or uses it in a Slack/Discord way by posting
| everything into "general chat"_
|
| Having thought about this a bit, I propose there is an
| underlying dichotomy between _" completers"_ and _"
| cultivators"_
|
| ## Completers
|
| Prioritize "velocity" and closing open loops. Limiting context
| means that they can act with focus. Close tabs often.
| Communication appends to the task queue; each conversation is
| an open ticket to be closed. Anything that scrolls off screen
| is implicitly marked as done. The ephemerality of the stream
| allows them to "process" a conversation and move on. Zulip
| might cause anxiety because threads/discussions _linger_
| without closure.
|
| ## Cultivators
|
| Communication as externalized cognition. Messages are nuggets
| to be filed / incorporated into a larger schema. Wants a
| "dashboard" to maintain sense of control; fears something
| falling through the cracks more than they fear clutter. Don't
| care to "finish" a chat; want to keep the context organized and
| accessible for deep work / future decisions.
|
| ## Problems
|
| Zulip defaults to assuming that all chat is valuable and taxes
| _every_ interaction with a little bit of up front effort. Slack
| assumes most chat is of ephemeral value and doesn 't see the
| point of taxing 90% of the interactions for the 10% that might
| be valuable. Slack forces cultivators to become completers and
| Zulip nudges completors to act as cultivators.
|
| Completers preferring who prefers Slack/Discord/etc are
| implicitly adopting the the fragmentation of multi-system setup
| -- chat for ephemeral communication, and anything longer term
| must move to docs/wikis/Jira/whatever (which now begs for
| dozens of "integrations"). Understanding the state of anything
| now requires forensic archeology. (cue [Charlie Pepe Silvia
| meme]) Complicated acrobatics in channel names such as `#team-
| proj-blah` are attempts at combating the fundamental entropy of
| treating everything ephemeral.
|
| The challenge is that, ultimately organizing is also real work
| and ignoring it in a short-sighted drive for efficiency hinders
| longer term effectiveness.
|
| ## Potential solutions?
|
| 1. The chat platform could offer two different views: a triage
| flavored mode for completers, and a dashboard flavored mode for
| cultivators. Even one person could toggle back-and-forth
| between the two as necessary.
|
| 2. Better UX for organizing incrementally, eg. UX improvements
| for manual clustering, and AI-assisted clustering / topic
| naming. _Wouldn 't it be great if people could continue
| chatting in the stream but the same message would
| simultaneously get filed under a topic?_ Technology might now
| enable such a product experience.
|
| 3. Slack needs to stop pretending that search is an effective
| replacement for organization (esp when search is crappy). I
| haven't used Slack in a while (preferring Zulip with catchall
| topics as a good balance) but I get the impression that Slack
| [Canvas](https://slack.com/intl/en-in/features/canvas) is an
| attempt to combat this problem.
|
| ----
|
| [Charlie Pepe Silvia meme] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-
| silvia
| carderne wrote:
| This is super interesting framing. I'm definitely a
| completer, not that I like much about Slack. Probably useful
| to have this kind of discussion before/while making knowledge
| management decisions in startups.
| zukzuk wrote:
| We've been using Zulip for our company chat for 2 years now. It
| does what we need it to do -- while letting us control where
| it's deployed and where the data is stored (!!). But the UI is
| dated and awkward. The general feeling I get is that everyone
| at our company is okay with Zulip, but no one loves it. It just
| has that air of mediocrity about it. It's "okay".
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| There are a lot of comments not liking zulip. I wonder if the
| like/dislike feeling is tied to the size of the user/company of
| the poster. My experience is the zulip works very well in my
| small 3 person fully remote business. Maybe the UI workflow of
| Zulip breaks down with larger numbers of users?
| bnlxbnlx wrote:
| i love zulip for so many things, and in particular the topic-
| first paradigm.
|
| and as long as it doesn't offer voice messages i keep going back
| to signal (or similar). for small groups i often find voice
| messages to be easiest (totally not for big groups, i agree!).
| roamerz wrote:
| Absolutely love Zulip. I think they are the #1 open source
| project out there for many reasons. Here are a few that come to
| mind:
|
| 1. Open source and the commitment to keep it there. 2. The
| continued technical excellence of the product. 3. Excellent and
| up-to-date documentation 4. Open to the public development effort
| that allows public participation (chat.zulip.org) 5. Availability
| of help from front line engineers and owners as well as the
| community. 6. Modern and organized UI with many options to tailor
| it to use case and environment. 7. Excellent choice of tech stack
| which has evolved to keep up with new technology. 8. An excellent
| place for aspiring developers to learn not only coding but other
| skills such as communication and relationship values.
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