alt Hacker NewsMy 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.
Replies
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.
> 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.
> 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?