[StavrosK]

I very much like Zulip, it's open source and much closer to email, even culturally. It encourages long-form replies and messages with subjects, so it requires at least a tiny amount of thought before you start talking to someone. I think it's a great cross between Slack and email.

[ethbro]

Just looked at it.

What keeps Zulip threads from exploding in practice? Either on the UI or usage side?

E.g. How to I keep from going from "One channel with a hundred unread messages" to "One channel with twenty unread threads"?

Also, what features exist when a thread diverges from the original topic?

E.g. We were talking about the "afternoon lunch" at the "annual meeting", and then someone mentioned their favorite restaurants in the area, and now people are replying to both?

Organization seems more like a usage problem than a technology problem. Or at least one that I can't see manual categorization solving.

[tabbott]

The point is that it's a lot faster to process 20 unread threads with 100 messages than 100 unread messages, because they're nicely grouped. E.g. you can skip reading the 30 messages in the thread about "afternoon lunch", without having to look at those messages (as you would with slack if you wanted to find out that the 'annual meeting' announcement happened).

For diverging topics, you can easily edit the topics of the messages that are a diversion to be a new topic. This helps a huge amount when you have new users who haven't learned the convention of creating a new topic when bringing up something unrelated, since anyone can clean it up in a few seconds.