Adam Stacoviak (Sep 18 2024 at 17:11): Adam Stacoviak (Sep 18 2024 at 17:11):Starting this new thread on Zulip and it's lack of awareness because I am simply beside myself that I've had multiple conversations with tech founders, etc in the last few weeks (since we've talked with Alya and have tried out Zulip)...and none of them know about Zulip!
OK, so why this new thread? Well, awareness is key for Zulip and I really believe that this realtime chat/email/forum is the bees knees and much better than Slack. Yet, no one knows about Zulip.
What can we (Changelog and this community) (or should we) do about this?
Ref: #general > Is this cool? y/n?
Brett Cannon (Sep 18 2024 at 17:20):Probably the biggest one is shutting down your Slack instance and officially moving over to Zulip. That might generate some buzz. After that is talking it up in social media, blog posts, etc. It also probably wouldn't hurt to harp on the fact that Zulip isn't taking away features that used to be free like Slack does, and can be self-hosted (e.g., no AI data harvesting).
But honestly I can't think of anything out of the ordinary beyond talking about it regularly can convincing people to come and try it out.
Adam Stacoviak (Sep 18 2024 at 17:26):Probably the biggest one is shutting down your Slack instance and officially moving over to Zulip.
Yes, I think shutting down our Slack will do something. Just not sure when we can do that. I know Jerod and I will be at ATO in a month and we'll likely talk about this there.
I have a call with Alya tomorrow afternoon about ways we can partner together and make things more official. What started as a "hey let's try this" has turned into a much easier to follow and more enjoyable community chat than I expected.
I'll report back here as things progress. Maybe we need to help them with some concerted marketing efforts. Anyone want to do a homepage teardown with me?
Jerod Santo (Sep 18 2024 at 17:29):After our migration is final I plan to write a blog post titled, “Slack is dead, long live Zulip”
Maybe we can get that to go nerd viral…
Adam Stacoviak (Sep 18 2024 at 17:31):That'll be dope.
Ricky Hussmann (Sep 18 2024 at 17:51):Jerod Santo said:
After our migration is final I plan to write a blog post titled, “Slack is dead, long live Zulip”
Slack Is Dead, Long Live Zulip Stop and Smell the Zulip
Adam Stacoviak (Sep 18 2024 at 17:53):Erm mah, can we talk about the name "Zulip"?
Ricky Hussmann (Sep 18 2024 at 17:54):It's like Xerox, but better. "It's better!"
Ricky Hussmann (Sep 18 2024 at 17:55)::grinning:
Ricky Hussmann (Sep 18 2024 at 17:55):Honestly, it reminds me of cold, western eastern European soup.
Nabeel S (Sep 18 2024 at 18:59):I think the name is not great. Not a huge deal, people can get used to it, but I wonder if it's a factor in the lackluster adoption.
Lars Ellingsen (Sep 18 2024 at 19:00):"Chat is dead, long live chat"
Andrew O'Brien (Sep 18 2024 at 19:34):Having never used it, I think I came into this thinking Zulip was more message board and less chat. I see now that it's kinda more like chat with the good parts of message boards. Very happy with how topics are organized.
James Thurley (Sep 18 2024 at 21:02):I only knew about it because there is a Rust Zulip at http://rust-lang.zulipchat.com, and the topics system works well for talking about lots of different issues and features on a large, distributed, technical project. It would be unmanageable in Slack I expect.
I wasn’t sure if it would work so well for more casual chatting, with the additional friction of having to come up with a subject, but this Changelog instance has convinced me it does.
If they could make it indexable by search engines that could help them a lot, because people would come across the public channels more organically in their browsers. There must be a wealth of information in the Rust Zulip that few people ever come across.
Daniel Buckmaster (Sep 19 2024 at 00:08):This is really exciting to hear. I love an underdog, especially when the underdog actually has a fantastic product!
I think there are situations where Slack's product decisions do make sense (eg where I work, I am not sure Zulip would be a better choice). But all too often it's just the default choice because nobody was fired for picking Salesforce. I hope you guys can help drive more awareness so that people are making informed choices not just default choices!
Daniel Buckmaster (Sep 19 2024 at 01:13):Adam Stacoviak said:
Anyone want to do a homepage teardown with me?
All I have to say is that the very slight hover-grow effect on the blue buttons right above the fold (e.g. "See it in use") is terrible :laughing:
Otherwise, pages like this are great.
Siddhartha Golu (Sep 19 2024 at 05:40):I think making public channels indexable by search engines would definitely help in adoption. I've not met anyone (online/offline) who doesn't like Zulip once they've gotten a chance to play around with it. Product is solid, it's the visibility that matters here and if people come across Zulip organically when searching for something (like in the case of Discourse), I'm sure this will create ripple effects.
Philip Durbin (Sep 19 2024 at 11:10):I'm excited that the Zulip experiment is going well for Changelog.
What Changelog could do specifically is switch some channels to Web-public. That way newcomers could have a peek inside this Zulip instance instead of being greeted with a login wall.
Jerod Santo (Sep 19 2024 at 13:31):Yeah I think we should make a bunch of channels web-public, certainly the podcast episode channels.
Chris Woods (Sep 19 2024 at 20:23):James Thurley said:
I only knew about it because there is a Rust Zulip at http://rust-lang.zulipchat.com, and the topics system works well for talking about lots of different issues and features on a large, distributed, technical project. It would be unmanageable in Slack I expect.
Yay, my second Zulip org. Maybe these will start accumulating like all of the Discord servers - including the official Rust Discord server. :upside_down:
Brett Cannon (Sep 19 2024 at 20:32):Ricky Hussmann said:
It's like Xerox, but better. "It's better!"
BMC needs to make a Zulip theme song!
Chris Woods (Sep 19 2024 at 20:37):Brett Cannon said:
Ricky Hussmann said:
It's like Xerox, but better. "It's better!"
BMC needs to make a Zulip theme song!
Ooooh, great idea! They need to do some marketing for sure. Maybe they could engage with him for the sound track for a marketing campaign :)
Philip Durbin (Sep 19 2024 at 21:06):Another thing we can do is use Zulip for our open source projects. I already moved the chat for Dataverse (my day job) to https://dataverse.zulipchat.com and I asked nicely to have a channel (#boston) for my local open source meetup on https://osdc.zulipchat.com
Daniel Buckmaster (Sep 19 2024 at 23:33):I'm going to have to start a popular open-source project just so I can start a Zulip community for it :laughing:
Matthew Sanabria (Sep 22 2024 at 15:18): David Brown (Sep 22 2024 at 18:31):I like Zulip, this is really great. Just need custom status messages.
Status: Listening to the Pod!
Philip Durbin (Sep 22 2024 at 18:33):@David Brown Hmm, it works for me. I just typed "MyCustomStatus".
David Brown (Sep 22 2024 at 18:35):Okay, figured it out! Nice!
Jerod Santo (Sep 25 2024 at 13:51):Our episode channels are now web-public! Check it out: https://changelog.zulipchat.com/
KBall (Sep 25 2024 at 15:52):Ok brand new here... can someone explain to me the mental model? On first glance it looks to me like a forum, not a chat... which... forums are fine but the usage modes are completely different.
James Thurley (Sep 25 2024 at 16:09):It's like Slack, except:
In Slack channels are just free-flowing conversations, often with multiple conversations overlapping, questions getting lost in the noise, sometimes threads being used and sometimes not, sometimes conversations jumping back out of threads into the main channel, etc.
In Zulip you also have channels, but channels contain distinct "topics" which are kind of like mini, dynamic, almost transient, channels in Slack. Every conversation in the channel happens in it's own topic. It makes it easier to handle having many parallel distinct conversations, not limited by the number of channels, compared to Slack.
James Thurley (Sep 25 2024 at 16:13):As an example, in my work Slack we have a channel called platform-technical for technical conversations about our platform.
But at some point people are deep in technical discussion, not using threads (because threads in Slack are a bit half-arsed), and you want to start another conversation. So what do you do? Well, we create a new channel called platform-technical-2 and use that when platform-technical is busy. Eventually we also ended up with platform-technical-3 for the same reason.
In Zulip, you can just have the one platform-technical channel, because all those conversations are distinct topics within the channel.
Jerod Santo (Sep 25 2024 at 16:34):KBall said:
On first glance it looks to me like a forum, not a chat
Imagine Slack and Discourse had a baby. Kinda like that.
KBall (Sep 25 2024 at 16:38):Kinda reminds me of https://twist.com/ which I used once in a consulting context. Will be interesting to see how it feels in practice... the key differences to me are slack/discord/other "pure chat" clients feel much more transient and realtime, where twist and other more forum-like things do not. And those feelings lead to different interaction patterns. :man_shrugging: we'll see what emerges here.
Jerod Santo (Sep 25 2024 at 16:46):The coolest thing here for us (in addition to its open source-y goodness and nerdy stuff like keyboard shorcuts) is that it's much easier to find and hop in to episode-focused discussions that you listen to later than most people. In Slack it's gone (even just 90 days later) and here you just find the channel and the numbered/named topic and you can see the entire discussion, then strike up a new one if you like. That's cool.
Siddhartha Golu (Sep 25 2024 at 16:47):I think it can be as real-time or as forum-like as you want it to be. My common complaint with Slack/Discord is that it is impossible to follow the conversation unless you're the one participating in it in real time, and complaint with Discourse is that DMs/private groups are considered second class citizens and their replies hierarchy is IMO just horrible to follow.
Zulip hits the sweet spot.
Alya Abbott (Sep 25 2024 at 18:45):James Thurley said:
If they could make it indexable by search engines that could help them a lot, because people would come across the public channels more organically in their browsers.
We've though about this in the past (see this issue), and have just kicked off a conversation about technical design options for making this work. Feedback/suggestions from folks in this community would be much appreciated!
Daniel Buckmaster (Sep 25 2024 at 19:59):I initially thought Zulip would be a lot more forum-like than it is. I think I'm getting the hang of it now, but initially I expected to be able to treat topics like forum posts. There are some ways you can (eg the "recent conversations" view) but it doesn't seem to be the primary way you're expected to interact with things.
Owen Valentine (Sep 26 2024 at 08:32):@Jerod Santo fancy https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive push to R2 while still cooking? :P
Owen Valentine (Sep 26 2024 at 08:54):Love the fact that there's a solution for this either way, even if integration into Zulip itself is much more of an ask. The power of not holding data ransom
Jerod Santo (Oct 03 2024 at 14:17):Starting to replace our Slack bits with Zulip bits. https://changelog.com/community now features Zulip. Dorfman hasn't joined here yet, also that quote is super old now. Anybody ready/willing/able to be featured here with a quote in his place?
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 03 2024 at 16:14):Unsolicited feedback: haven't tried on desktop yet, but on mobile it's not clear the Zulip logo is a link! Maybe that worked with Slack logo if that's how it was previously, but the Zulip logo isn't so familiar. I didn't realise I had to click "welcome back" to get to more links!
Jerod Santo (Oct 03 2024 at 16:16):Yeah I need to add a big button to "Launch Zulip" whether you're signed in or not. Since many of our channels are public we should take folks directly to it so they can preview what they're signing up for
Dan Cardin (Oct 04 2024 at 14:06):do topics just pile up forever? i still probably dont know what i'm doing in zulip, but i almost thinkg i understand discourse better because i can understand the timeline better
Dan Cardin (Oct 04 2024 at 14:09):like i didn't pay attention to zulip for a few days and there were 200+ unread things and no obvious way to mark everything as read. and now there's tens of topics in General, but less of a forum-y way of navigating them reverse chronologically per latest messages, or to specifically alert me to new responses in threads i've interacted in (both familiar things to me from discourse)
Adam Stacoviak (Oct 04 2024 at 15:42):Combined feed does that well I think. Have you seen that view? It's the a keyboard shortcut for me.
Dustin (Oct 04 2024 at 15:43):It's not obvious on mobile (I think it's behind a long press) but any channel's triple dot menu has a 'mark as read' option. As does each individual thread.
Dan Cardin (Oct 04 2024 at 16:58):does the combined feed not just feel like slack minus all the channels, but with inline threads?
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 04 2024 at 16:58):@Dan Cardin you can also "follow topic" to get notifications or "mute topic" for the opposite. I felt similarly overwhelmed when I first started using Zulip for real, but having messages in topics means I can actually choose to ignore a bunch of stuff when I come back and there's tons of unreads. Or at least browse messages topic by topic, rather than all unreads at once.
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 04 2024 at 16:58):I usually go to my inbox, scan for topics I'm interested in, read them, then "mark all as read". On mobile, you have to go to the combined feed to mark all as read, which is a little annoying.
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 04 2024 at 16:59):IIRC there's no 'combined feed' in slack right, no way to see all messages in all channels?
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 04 2024 at 17:15):Dan Cardin said:
do topics just pile up forever?
I think the answer is yes, which seems kinda odd. On the other hand, topics are content-addressed :joy: so they only keep piling up due to people discussing more things, if that makes sense. I think when I came to Zulip I thought it was more forum-like, due to topics. However, it's not really. It's not Discourse, it's closer to Slack/IRC but with just that little bit extra (topics) which help triage my inbox.
Matthew Fish (Oct 04 2024 at 19:37):Adam Stacoviak said:
Combined feed does that well I think. Have you seen that view? It's the
akeyboard shortcut for me.
This just changed the game for me :sunglasses:
Philip Durbin (Oct 04 2024 at 22:14):Topics do pile up forever but they can be marked as resolved. Of course, this won't apply to many topics (/me coughs #general > WordPress Drama ). :grinning:
Fershad Irani (Oct 05 2024 at 00:54):Daniel Buckmaster said:
I usually go to my inbox, scan for topics I'm interested in, read them, then "mark all as read".
I pretty much use the Recent conversations view in the same way. That's my default home view, and I really like how I can just triage all the conversations that have been ongoing while I've been away and then dive into the ones I want.
Troy Wolf (Oct 05 2024 at 16:06):I am new to Changelog, the 1st episode I listened to was the long interview about Zulip. Great stuff!
I immediately followed the Digital Ocean link in the Zulip documentation and fired up a self-hosted Zulip instance. The fact that it simply worked (after a very long automated setup script finished) earned Zulip major kudos from me. :coffee:
I use Slack most all day every day as part of my employment. I am also in a couple developer communities on Slack. Slack works great for our relatively small, focused team at work. However, one of the dev communities I am in has 800+ people in it and dozens of channels. It is way too easy for things to get lost in the noise. It seems like Zulip's approach could work better than Slack for large community chat.
My immmediate interest in Zulip was as a replacement for my church community's use of GroupMe. GroupMe is working fine for us, but there are some pitfalls--especially for a church asking students to get into the chat....and then some students getting into destructive chat relationships outside the intended community. Oops. :poop:
Playing around with my Zulip instance, I like what I see. However, the show-stopper for a community (100+ people or so) is that in order to have push notifications on mobile, even with self-hosted, it's $3.50 *per user per month*. I understand it is a necessary evil, and appreciate that Zulip explains this in great detail. Yes one could compile their own versions of the native apps to enable direct push notifications, but...I'm not that hard-core. :upside_down:
I am definitely a fan of Zulip so far (and Changelog). Thanks for doing what you do! :raised_hands:
Troy Wolf (Oct 05 2024 at 16:10):Some feedback: I went to your website, found the Zulip episode, then clicked the Discussion link. That took me to this new Zulip chat instance. I could see the episode channels: "interviews", "friends", "practicalai", etc.
Then I subscribed and joined the chat community. Now when I log in, I don't see those episode based channels. I can find them if I "Browse 13 more channels", but seems odd they are not part of what I'm auto-subscribed, to. ...but this is coming from someone brand new to changelog. I am, therefore, quite unencumbered by facts! :coffee:
Philip Durbin (Oct 05 2024 at 16:51):Well, if you join https://chat.zulip.org you get auto-subscribed to about 30 channels. Here you only get auto-subscribed to three (#general #kaizen and #sandbox ). I suppose more could be added. :thinking:
valon-loshaj (Oct 05 2024 at 20:25):loving this zulip messaging approach. so cool!
Troy Wolf (Oct 05 2024 at 22:35):Philip Durbin said:
Well, if you join https://chat.zulip.org you get auto-subscribed to about 30 channels. Here you only get auto-subscribed to three (#general #kaizen and #sandbox ). I suppose more could be added. :thinking:
I think it makes sense that a new member would at least be subscribed to the same channels as the public view. It's probably normal that a person would first hit this chat anonymously and see the public view. Once they join, it's mildly disruptive to login and those episode channels are "missing"...until you unbury them and subscribe.
Would it make sense to at least auto-subscribe new members to the same channels as the public view? Members can unsubscribe easy enough. This seems a lesser evil to me considering a new member is still figuring out the system. :coffee:
Jerod Santo (Oct 05 2024 at 22:44):Troy Wolf said:
Would it make sense to at least auto-subscribe new members to the same channels as the public view?
I'm down with this if people think it's a good idea...
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 06 2024 at 20:00):@Troy Wolf do you think your community could survive on email notifications instead of mobile push? Or, I wonder to what extent the topic/inbox flow with Zulip makes push notifications less necessary, as it's easier to catch up later rather than feel the need to participate in real time.
Daniel Buckmaster (Oct 06 2024 at 20:01):I guess it depends if you expect to have a lot of discussions that are actually time-sensitive.
E.g. I can remember a time where I only had a Slack contact for someone and was trying to communicate about meeting them at a physical event, where it would be useful for them to get notifications!
Troy Wolf (Oct 06 2024 at 20:21):@Daniel Buckmaster , if it were up to me, I'd be fine without push notifications for the community I'm thinking of. I wouldn't even use the native app. In my limited testing, I found that the mobile browser version of Zulip works great. On my Android chrome browser, I used the "Add to homescreen" option, which installed the "app" (I assume a PWA?). Now it feels like a native app on my phone. As long as I have that app open (background is fine), I get notified of new messages.
I kind of like NOT being notified unless I choose to have that app running--whether in the foreground or background. However, people seem to want push notifications.
As for email notification, as long as it were throttled--like tell me a channel or topic has a new message, but don't email me again until I've visited the chat--that would work for me. However, the community I have in mind is a lot of Jr & Sr high school students. I don't know if you've noticed, but these young whipper-snappers these days don't tend to use email. :older_man:
Troy Wolf (Oct 06 2024 at 20:42):If I expand #general, then "SHOW ALL TOPICS", it's a pretty long list. How does Zulip handle this over time? What about when there are 500 topics? Is it just one huge list to scroll through? Do the topics marked as resolved fall off into an archive or something so they aren't clogging up the list? :thinking:
Alya Abbott (Oct 11 2024 at 07:36):Troy Wolf said:
Playing around with my Zulip instance, I like what I see. However, the show-stopper for a community (100+ people or so) is that in order to have push notifications on mobile, even with self-hosted, it's $3.50 *per user per month*.
@Troy Wolf We have generous discount and sponsorship programs for community organizations, as noted on the plans page and (in more detail) in the help center. You should reach out.
Christopher Patti (Oct 15 2024 at 19:31):I am positively delighted you folks switched. Zulip has been around for years and years and I have personally always found it to be superior to other chat systems in all kinds of ways. Its threads don't give me a screaming headache like some others :smile:
Jerod Santo (Oct 16 2024 at 13:39):Baby steps toward getting the word out there. Feel free to share this video around, if you like:
Philip Durbin (Oct 16 2024 at 23:19):Ha. I forgot how Jerod floated the idea of Zulip on a sailboat. :rofl: :sailboat: 
Don MacKinnon (Oct 24 2024 at 17:22):Seems like the conversations on Slack have died off and have picked up over here. @Jerod Santo do you guys know if the majority of the active Slack members have created accounts here?
Jerod Santo (Oct 24 2024 at 17:39):@Don MacKinnon there's certainly some folks who haven't moved over, but it's hard to tell for sure what percentage we're at
Jarvis Yang (Oct 24 2024 at 17:59):Don MacKinnon said:
Seems like the conversations on Slack have died off and have picked up over here. Jerod Santo do you guys know if the majority of the active Slack members have created accounts here?
For me, I signed out and closed that slack workspace.
Nick Sweeting (Nov 20 2024 at 22:21):(there is a slack bridge if you want to mirror messages to zulip, my org uses it often to mirror chats with our consulting clients into our zulip)
Last updated: Dec 12 2024 at 15:40 UTC