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Comment by mrjn | Hacker News Reader

Founder of Struct here. I looked at Zulip before starting Struct. And I'm sorry -- I don't think it's the same. Threads in Zulip are really sub-channels, and the idea of a unified feed like "All Threads" doesn't exist -- at least, that was my perception of Zulip. And just looking at the site right now, it feels the same as before. I could be wrong.

Struct is different. It's a reimagination of what a chat platform would look like if you were to completely give up the idea of chats in a serial log of channels (IRC, Slack, Discord), and embrace threads and feeds whole-heartedly. When everything is a thread, the platform can work remarkably well for users.

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> the idea of a unified feed like "All Threads" doesn't exist

I believe it does. You get a feed of all messages; and still organized by a topic, quite conveniently.

I don’t use it, though, since from anywhere in GUI I can immediately jump to the next unread message, irregardless of topic or stream, simply by pressing “n” on keyboard (preceded by Esc if I happened to be typing; my draft is saved reliably).

Indeed, Zulip has several views along the lines of "All threads", designed for different use cases and user preferences:

- https://zulip.com/help/inbox

- https://zulip.com/help/recent-conversations

- https://zulip.com/help/all-messages

> unified feed like "All Threads"

I don't understand why I'd need or want this. I saw it in the video and was horrified. Multiple feeds updating as I'm watching them is just too much going on.

When I'm chatting, I don't want to pay attention to 10 different things at once. I'm most productive when I am working on one task (with a single topic), which may require me to refer back to Slack periodically.

Struct looks like it has two differentiating features: 1) it surfaces irrelevant distractions in the All Threads channel, and 2) it creates the tl;dr summary. The former seems actively harmful to productivity, and the latter seems like it could be useful.

You could create a focused custom feed. For example, I have one for "tasks assigned to me". That's what I set to when I'm focused working.

That's the beauty right -- you can control and filter what you see. As opposed to channel based interactions, where your boundaries are set in stone on channel creation.

But I don't currently use Slack as a task manager and don't want an unstructured task manager with no due dates or tags.

Yup. That's the point I'm making. Slack is used as ephemeral messaging system, a knowledge void. Struct aims to proves that more is possible.

Gmail threads can also be task managers. That doesn't mean they're the right UI for it.

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