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by Valk3_ 135 days ago
> Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)

Could you expand on this?
2 comments
bo1024 135 days ago
Slack has basically one main hierarchy level (messages are grouped into channels) while Zulip has two, streams and topics. So you can create a stream for each project (say) and create a different topic for any given point that needs discussion about that project.

Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn’t get in the way of the other threads.

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crabmusket 135 days ago
> didn’t get in the way of the other threads

But also, critically, if you want to, you can drop back to the "show me everything sequentially" view. Threads hide discussions away - which is good when you want to focus on something else, but bad when you can't remember where a discussion was.

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folmar 135 days ago
The killer feateure is that it's very easy to move last $x messages to another topic, so if someone writes a short note that begins a conversation everyone is free to reorganize it, and also moving messages between threads is easy and nice.
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jwiz 135 days ago
From what I have read (not having actually used Zulip) it always sounded like the chats were threaded in the same way that mailing lists or newsgroups are threaded.

How accurate is that understanding?

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crabmusket 135 days ago
That seems like a reasonable comparison. I've thought of Zulip as halfway between IRC and a forum.
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bo1024 134 days ago
No, it’s not fully threaded like those examples (or HN). In a particular discussion, you can’t reply to a post in the middle and have your reply branch off from the main discussion.
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tabbott 135 days ago
Check out https://zulip.com/for/communities/ and some of the linked case studies; they explain it better than I'll be able to in a quick comment.

But the main reason is that the topics-based organization and ability for moderators to move/split conversations means one can read and participate in a community much more fully given a fixed amount of time.

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