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.
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+100 for Zulip though; by far the sanest messaging experience for this kind of context.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.
I didn't think it was terrible software by any stretch of the imagination - just not really suitable for informal communication.
Zulip was founded in 2012, Discourse was released in 2014.
I wish there was a way to hold companies accountable for stuff like that.
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.
> That'd be the ultimate hard-mode for a business that was dedicated to being rugpull-resistant.
(EDIT: unless your reason for using Discord is PTT voice channels. Then it's not.)