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alya

79 karma · joined September 22, 2014

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alya··on Radicle: Sovereign {code forge} built on Git
Zulip product lead here -- I'm not aware of anything in this space that used to work and no longer does.

There's long been a way to make Zulip channels searchable with zulip-archive (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive), and that continues to be available.

Making the app-native web-public channels accessible to search engines is a big technical project, tracked as https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881.

alya··on Zulip.com Values
Thanks for the feedback! I think feature closest to what you're requesting is followed topics (https://zulip.com/help/follow-a-topic), which you can filter to in the inbox. Perhaps we could add an option to auto-follow topics in a specific channel to other ways of auto-following topics.
alya··on AI Usage Policy
At the Zulip open-source project, we've had a significant onslaught of AI slop in the past few months. It gets as absurd as PR descriptions with AI-generated "screenshots" of the app to "demonstrate" the changes. We've had to start warning contributors that we won't be able to review their work if they continue misusing AI, and occasionally banning repeat offenders. It's feels draining -- we want to spend our time mentoring people who'll actually learn from feedback, not interacting with contributors who are just copy-pasting LLM responses without thought.

Our evolving AI policy is in the same spirit as ghostty's, with more detail to address specific failure modes we've experienced: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/contribu...

alya··on Discord to File Confidentially for IPO
Zulip's product lead here. Communities are eligible for a free Community plan if they self-host, and there are discounts and sponsorships available for Zulip Cloud as well.
alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)
Zulip | Go-to-market leader | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and give users control over their data. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re increasing our focus on go-to-market initiatives, and are looking for a go-to-market leader with hands-on B2B startup experience to take our business to the next level. This is a unique opportunity to take a well-engineered product with traction at thousands of organizations and drive the process of bringing it to a huge potential audience.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs+gtm@zulip.com.

alya··on Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory
Zulip's product lead here. Yep, reading messages thread by thread is the recommended way for most folks. (There's even a keyboard shortcut for going to the next one.) The inbox view, which lists the threads where you have unread messages, is the default home view (unless your org admins changed that setting).

The combined feed is helpful for some (e.g., in lower-traffic organizations, or if you like to see messages as they come in), and was the default home view many years ago.

alya··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
Zulip's product lead here. We hear from a variety of folks that they've had a good experience with onboarding to Zulip, https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ being a good example. That said, the mental model for using Zulip is a bit different from other chat apps, and I think it helps a lot to approach onboarding with intention.

Making the experience of getting started with Zulip more smooth has been an ongoing priority for the past couple of years, and we've got more in the works. If there are particular aspects of the app that felt too technical, I'd love to get the feedback.

alya··on Discord client that works on Win95*, Win98 and above
If you are using Zulip for an open-source project or a community, you are likely eligible for our free Community plan, which includes push notifications. https://zulip.com/help/self-hosted-billing#free-community-pl...

We charge businesses for our push notifications service because we need folks using our 100% open-source product to run their business to help pay the cost of developing it.

alya··on Slack to destroy >90d history of free communities
https://zulip.com/values explains how we are building Zulip to be sustainable for the long term (without VC funding).
alya··on The best way to have complex discussions?
Absolutely! Reworking the onboarding experience is one of our main focus areas right now; we plan to remove the bubbles altogether, and replace them with other types of onboarding content.
alya··on The best way to have complex discussions?
Zulip's core design goal is to make it effective for complex discussions, and our users tell us that it's working. E.g., cutting-edge math research https://zulip.com/case-studies/lean/; Rust language development https://zulip.com/case-studies/rust/.
alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2023)
Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2023)
Zulip | Senior Frontend Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior frontend engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will work closely with Zulip’s product and design leads to drive work on a major initiative to redesign Zulip’s core surfaces.

Check out https://zulip.com/jobs/ to learn more, and apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2023)
Zulip | Senior Frontend Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior frontend engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will work closely with Zulip’s product and design leads to drive work on a major initiative to redesign Zulip’s core surfaces.

Check out https://zulip.com/jobs/ to learn more, and apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2023)
Zulip | Senior Frontend Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior frontend engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will work closely with Zulip’s product and design leads to drive work on a major initiative to redesign Zulip’s core surfaces.

Check out https://zulip.com/jobs/ to learn more, and apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2022)
Zulip | Senior Mobile Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior mobile engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will design new features and subsystems, write design proposals for discussion, and build them in JavaScript using React Native.

We also have an opening for a Senior Frontend Engineer. For full details on both of these positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2022)
Zulip | Senior Mobile Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior mobile engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will design new features and subsystems, write design proposals for discussion, and build them in JavaScript using React Native.

We are also hiring for other Engineering and Marketing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2022)
Zulip | Senior Frontend Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior frontend engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will work closely with Zulip’s product and design leads to drive work on a major initiative to redesign Zulip’s core surfaces.

We are also hiring for other Engineering and Marketing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2022)
Zulip | Senior Mobile Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior mobile engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will design new features and subsystems, write design proposals for discussion, and build them in JavaScript using React Native.

We are also hiring for other Engineering and Marketing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration
To clarify here, from https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats:

> Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines.

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 is the issue to track for the native search indexing feature.

alya··on Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration
Thank you for elaborating and for the kind words!
alya··on Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration
Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for a chat, please reach out by email at support@zulip.com, or in the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community (https://zulip.com/development-community/)!
alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)
Zulip | Senior Mobile Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior mobile engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will design new features and subsystems, write design proposals for discussion, and build them in JavaScript using React Native.

We are also hiring for other Engineering, Marketing, and Technical Writing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
Zulip | Senior Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior infrastructure engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will design and build new features and subsystems, and collaborate with other experts on our infrastructure team to deploy and maintain the servers that power Zulip Cloud.

We are also hiring for other Engineering, Marketing, and Technical Writing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)
Zulip | Senior Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior infrastructure engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will design and build new features and subsystems, and collaborate with other experts on our infrastructure team to deploy and maintain the servers that power Zulip Cloud.

We are also hiring for other Engineering, Marketing, and Technical Writing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)
Zulip | Senior Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We’re looking for a senior infrastructure engineer to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. In this role, you will design and build new features and subsystems, and collaborate with other experts on our infrastructure team to deploy and maintain the servers that power Zulip Cloud.

We are also hiring for other Engineering, Marketing, and Technical Writing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2022)
Zulip | Senior Product Designer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time or part-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We are looking for an experienced product designer with a strong background in visual design to make our web and mobile applications shine. Zulip is a smart, powerful tool built for scale. By working to also make Zulip elegant and easy to learn, you will have the opportunity to have a huge impact on the growth of our product.

We are also hiring for Engineering, Marketing, and Technical Writing roles. For full details on this role and other open positions, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at jobs@zulip.com.

alya··on Why Zulip will stand the test of time
Head of Product for Zulip here. We appreciate the feedback! We are actively recruiting for a designer role (https://zulip.com/jobs/#designer), and making these types of improvements will be a major priority in the coming year.
alya··on Against Discord Channels
We host the full version of Zulip for free for open-source projects. :) https://zulip.com/for/open-source/