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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Threads are one major reason I like Zulip over Slack, but speed is another. I usually have two different instances open on my browser with no problems, and one of them has dozens of conversations going on at once.

Zulip is also one of the only apps I put on my iPhone, and it's straightforward and unobtrusive.

For some reason when I use Slack, the keys feel mushy. I think they're doing so much stuff in the background that my keystrokes get delayed.

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They are the primary reason to use Zulip. In this way, Zulip is more of a Teams competitor than it is a Slack competitor.

I, frankly, cannot stand threads. I want a chat room, not a realtime forum. I understand why people would like that, but it still bothers the shit out of me.

I work for MS so we have to use Teams, but I'd prefer opt-in to threads vs. threads by default. I fully understand and accept that my way isn't going to be the way for everyone, but when looking for a community chat option for friends, we uninstalled zulip in less than a day and ended up going with matrix. That didn't work super well for us at the time so we went with Mattermost, which much closer aligns to our chat preferences.

The good news is there are tons of options for people to choose what fits best for them! That's super exciting!

Can't you just make a single "general" room and talk in there? Have you ever used Zulip? Your objection puzzles me a bit because I can't see how it's a problem, since your use case is trivially supported.

Yes, I've used zulip - every single comment spawned a thread or responded to a thread. Users weren't used to responding to a thread, which meant we had threads of single comments constantly. I'm puzzled that you're puzzled. I thought this was the way Zulip worked. It was about 2 years ago, at any rate. Did it change since then? If so, that's exciting in its own right.

Hmm, that sounds like something was going wrong, threads don't just spawn, you have to create them, and a thread with a single comment kind of defeats the purpose.

Oh, were you editing the subject every time you commented, maybe? That's not indicated, you only edit the subject when you want to create a new thread. In our use case, threads were relatively infrequent and specific to a topic, e.g. "middle name database migration", and that's where the discussion for that happened.

Somehow we had like 15 users and not one of them managed to make a comment that wasn't a new thread - like I said though, it was like 2 years ago. Either there was a bug, or it was a design decision, or maybe even a misconfiguration on the server - regardless it got a hearty thumbs down by the community and we went on to try matrix. I was hoping for Zulip since it was a way easier install than matrix + riotweb was, especially since we wanted to self host everything. In the end all the bugs we had in riotweb and the phone apps were enough for us to jump for MM, which has its own problems but was most in line with what we wanted.

Anyway, if Zulip isn't thread-first, then I guess it's less a competitor to Teams than I thought. The only way we found to make teams work for us and our very small team is to keep everything in a named joint chat and everyone utterly ignores the channels like the plague. It's always amusing when someone posts something to a channel for the first time in weeks/months and then people start responding thinking it's chat and every. single. response. becomes a new thread, because they didn't respond inside the original thread.

That's very odd to me, I've never had that problem and don't see why it could be.

Zulip is thread-only, it's just that thread can be used as channels if you ignore the top level (streams).

This is the case (and it's okay)!

Every message (other than PMs) is within a topic thread which is within a stream.

This can be structured by having ongoing social threads but users do need to know that they should respond to existing "broad topic ongoing" threads instead of creating a new micro-thread for every message.

We structure the Streams into roughly:

- company-wide announcements

- org streams

- team streams

- social

then within #social you could have ongoing topics like "books", "weekend", "music", etc...

You can also restrict stream access as needed (only team members can view the team stream).

I bet that was the problem; we created streams for channels and vs. having a single stream with all the channels being threads inside of them.

You are lost in a maze of twisty threads, all alike.

Hmm. I’m not sure that’s a game I want to be forced to play.

Of course you should use what you like, but I'm also puzzled because you can "ignore" threads if you want in Zulip by keeping your focus on the channel.

For example I have a channel called #oil-discuss. It has a bunch of separate threads. If I put the focus on the left bar in #oil-discuss, then it shows me all the messages in chronological order, regardless of thread.

If you click on a thread, then you see only the messages in that thread. So I think it's the best of both worlds.

----

Unfortunately it doesn't go the other way around in my experience -- Slack can't emulate Zulip. I joined Slack to discuss a nascent Python project.

https://twitter.com/teoliphant/status/1217611221396082695?la...

The creator of the channel encouraged everyone to use Slack threads to keep the conversation organized. But the threading was so awkward -- it felt felt like my replies were getting "lost" on the side, outside the main flow.

Multiple people disliked the Slack threading and eventually we tried python-dev's nascent Zulip instance instead. Although I think the conversation died out in both places for other reasons.

I'd suspect it depends on what you're using it for - our instance of chat is primarily roughly themed chat rooms where we can talk about video games and bitch about python or rust or scala or home improvement projects or the news. It's very much so a modern day AOL chatroom experience, and that's by desire. We have discourse for things that make sense for deep threading, but for the most part everyone ignores it and just uses the chatrooms or the fairly effervescent threading in MM (that is basically the same as Slack's).

If you're looking for a more real-time mailing list type behavior though, then Slack or MM would be a terrible, terrible, terrible choice imo.

> The good news is there are tons of options for people to choose what fits best for them! That's super exciting!

Personally I'm finding it a bit of a nightmare, as just about every community I'm interested in seems to require a different tool to be installed. Same for work clients.

Worse than that, some communities are fragmented into different IM tool groups.

The plethora of IM and other tools needed to stay vaguely involved in the leading edge conversation in multiple communities is a right pain for usability.

What I really want is some way to see an overview of conversations in multiple communities I'm interested in and interact with them through that. A single tool would be nice, but some way of visually integrating similar tools would be ok as well.

I was pretty happy with Pidgin for this many years ago, as it worked with almost everything. But even then I needed Skype separately. I don't think libpurple is quite as universal now.

Matrix is an attempt, but by no means a solution.

I tend to use the web clients for everything for just this reason. Turning notifications on gives me the same toast behavior I'd have in a thick client and I'm not running 14 instances of electron at a time. I can see this being frustrating for you, though (just because I found something that works for me doesn't mean it'll work for everyone!)

That's a good suggestion, and as it happens I use web clients when possible as well.

That sucks in a different way, as the experience tends to be sub par, but at least it works (when on desktop - it's high friction when I've only got my phone to hand).

It's still much like having a different application for every community or work client though - only it's become a different tab for each of them, with the tabs organised by application rather than by usefulness (or there are too many tabs), which is a poor way to organise.

It also makes it difficult to organise information beyond the crude tools provided. Desktop notifications exist, yes, but I would find it so much more useful to be able to filter content and notify me of only relevant things, sort, pin, annotate, link and so on. And for this prioritisation and context management to mediate between different information sources globally, rather than having to use my own brain to do it manually, which I find to be a significant cognitive load.

> Matrix is an attempt, but by no means a solution.

Care to elaborate why you think so? (Obviously it's not there yet, but does anything make you think it won't?)

As it's not there yet, it's not a solution for my requirement.

Eventually, maybe.

For now, I think using Matrix to bridge to every other service is quite daunting. Consider these instructions which seem to be needed to connect to a Telegram group:

https://wiki.calculate-linux.org/matrix_telegram_bridge

I'm lucky that I can easily follow those instructions if I want. But to do all that just for 1 group?

The next one uses Slack.

Then Mattermost.

Then Discord.

Then IRC/Freenode.

My client uses MSN.

My other client uses Yahoo.

My other other client uses Skype.

A recruiter contacts me through WhatsApp, when I didn't have installed.

Another contacts me through LinkedIn.

Another through Telegram.

A friend sent me a message over Facebook Messenger. Of course I didn't get the Facebook message for 6 months due to not logging in :-)

(A friend of mine received a message over WhatsApp and didn't know for 12 months because of not having it installed at all, only to find someone they thought had stopped talking to them was actually sending WhatsApp messages, assuming of course everyone uses it.)

And then there are those group chats on Zoom sometimes.

I haven't listed them all...

Matrix has a long way to go before it's reasonably low effort to use seamless integration with all contact points that are coming up in practice.

I looked at Matrix recently, and it's very impressive how much has been implemented!

I'm almost certainly going to start using Matrix soon, if only because some communities I want to follow are on matrix.org itself.

But seamless, easy, and confident integration with many third party channels seems like it may be a long way off. (I'd also worry about messages getting lost or something due to services not integrating well with third party clients, especially given the adversarial relationship some services have.)

The problem is that everything and its pets seem to be using different services, and some of those want to live in walled gardens.

Amidst this, to be honest, I don't even use IM much! I'm not the chatting type.

But for key people or teams I need to use whatever they use, and for community awareness on the internet I want to see conversation where other people are discussing what I'm interested in, and pick up on key items sufficiently close to real-time to participate if I want.

Oh yeah, it absolutely has a long way to go before it's approachable for even the average power user. But I'm hopeful that with enough traction we will get to a better point than either libpurple (pidgin) or bitlbee before long.

I personally find threads better for actually getting work done while more focused chat like in Slack is better for “water cooler” talk. I know it isn’t the same for everyone, but I’ve found the orgs using Teams to be a bit more productive and a bit less chatty.

We found the basic models in Slack, Teams and Zulip too rigid. In all such clones of the Slack design, the members of channels (and threads) are static. You are either a participant in the entire channel or you arent. But it doesnt work like that in the real world.

For starters, a thread is a personal idea. (I think this is what you mean by opt-in). My idea of a thread is probably not your idea of a thread. So the concept of shared thread (channel) is hard to fathom. Second, my thread is made of activities I need to complete for the task at hand. In the process, I will interact with as many people or as few as I see fit, all in the pursuit of my goal.

Not all the people I interact with (thread participants) are necessarily members of my team. This is where the rigidity is a real problem with the aforementioned products. I cannot know all the participants at the time of channel creation. And once involve a non-team-member user in the thread, they become unwitting recipients of noise, and they cant do a damn thing about it.

There's gotta be a better way.

You may not even need the app. Zulip on Android Firefox is a better experience for me than the app, personally. (Tho the web version was, oddly, severely laggy in mobile Chrome the one time I tried it, some time ago...)

Oooh, thanks for this. I adore Zulip but the Android app is pretty terrible :(

Can you share what you did not like about the app? I would love to know what the users don't like so we can work on those areas.

The UI is somewhat confusing; also, it seems designed to give a view of particular, selected streams and topics of interest, and doesn't always seem to keep up even with those -- but volume on my server is low enough that I want "all messages", and if there's UI which does that reliably... it's not signposted well enough for me to find it before my patience ran out.

Thanks for your response. I've brought this up for discussion on our community server and we will try to find ways to make our UI more intuitive.

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