alt Hacker NewsI'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts.
Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their identity.
Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are:
- Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade.
- Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)
- Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc.
- It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that ~1500 people have successfully contributed code to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business.
- We are a values-focused organization (https://zulip.com/values/) where providing a public service is important to us all.
- Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE).
I'm happy to answer any questions.
Replies
I recently moved a small community group from Slack to Zulip. Half because of the UX for infrequent visitors (topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"). And half because of your organisational values, which are more aligned with ours than are those of Salesforce.
The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit.
Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the Zulip team work in public is inspiring!
Hey, just wanted to say that I am a happy Zulip customer.
I used it at my previous employer and after a month of hangringing from people- many did not desire to go back to what we had before. (though some people did say they wanted Slack for the emojis and “prettiness”).
Now I started in a new position and I’ve positioned Zulip (on prem) as the only viable solution since we’re shirking SaaS as a strategic move.
The people who followed me to the new place are quite glad of this, or at least thats what I am told.
So, thank you, sincerely.
My biggest feature use of Discord is the drop in / out voice with PTT. I couldn't quite tell if this feature exist.
> Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)
Could you expand on this?
How does Zulip compare to Campfire and Stoat (and other FOSS) efforts? How is onboarding for non-tech people?
This is great to hear and ironically we (Pidgin) just decided that Zulip was going to be the next protocol we were going to add support for just barely 24 hours ago before all this Discord nonsense!
https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...
What is the video calling and screen share experience like?
> Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade.
You lost me there. I need to have all my contacts on Zulip. Nothing else matters to me
What’s the state of accessibility on Zulip?
(Thanks for making Zulip, I love it)
Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without handholding?
I don’t have any questions as of yet, but reading your site; it speaks to me and those values align with mine. Just wanted to say that I think the world could use a bit more of this.
Thank you! Zulip is a great project.
Looking for your features but no voice chat, no screen sharing, no deal.
Sold
I'm asking because I hate Matrix and actually want you to convince me: why should I accept the risk of migrating my friend group from Discord to Zulip, which has already "broken the seal" of restricting features behind a monthly fee even for self-hosted users, when I could migrate us to Matrix instead? Matrix seems like the much less risky option.
I see that you have a "community" tier that's free and doesn't restrict notifications, but it's not clear to me exactly what's involved in proving that we should qualify.