Redis, Postgres, Rabbitmq and Memcached just to run a chat?
It is neither a tech demo nor a product, it is a mature open source project.
In fact, in my mind tech demos tend towards having fewer mature components.
> Redis, Postgres, Rabbitmq and Memcached just to run a chat
That set of dependencies seems quite normal to me for a mature project. Mastodon (the most popular open-source-twitterish-thing) has a similar set of dependencies, and is also effectively just chat as you say.
Discourse, a popular open source forum, is also basically just chat, and has a similar set of dependencies.
In the case of zulip, you can even use a hosted version and avoid running anything yourself.
I don't understand why its totally normal set of dependencies turns you off so harshly. I'll happily take a project using redis/postgresql/etc instead of trying to build its own versions of those baked into the binary because components like postgres/redis/etc have great documentation, tooling for metrics and monitoring, etc... If the project bakes its own stuff in itself to avoid taking on dependencies, I doubt it will either be as good or as easy to manage.
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/install.ht...
> just to run a chat
Don't overlook the fact that this is a scalable and stable solution used by many companies with thousands of users for each instance. I would have my doubts about the project if it wouldn't use those components.
With the addition that Mattermost is open core, not fully open source.
We're looking at paying for Slack and mattermost seems to offer most of what Slack does and is something that would be pretty easy to run. It's slick. Well documented and installs nicely in a container.
Has anyone here used Mattermost?
We only have/had a short eval phase and our use case is a small raceengineering team with 40 people at the racetrack, independent of internet access. So a very particualar use case, and our needs might not cover you needs.
Zulip pro
* Threading model (can't value that high enough)
* All messages overview, no matter what stream they were written in
* Zulip community at chat.zulip.org with direct contact to the devs. Tim Abbott the lead dev helped me out in a issue with a user login (haven't used the Mattermost support so can't compare)
Zulip con
* Most ops work has to be done by a python script manage.py, API has room to improve
Mattermost pro
* API
* haven't measured but the UI felt smoother, faster
Mattermost con
* you have to pay for Enterprise features
Both have great docs and a docker deployment
Our use case is basic chat features with some integrations for a team of around 40.
We run it in a t2.small instance along with another tool. I only had to manually restart it once, which is fine by me.
A postgres backend and S3 storage is most welcome and makes it very simple to manage.
My only complaint would be that the config file is not included in the postgres database so you need a separate routine for its backup. (If anyone from Mattermost reads this, please just include it in the database)
It could also handle importing multiple emojis for us Hipchat castaways.
Both mattermost and zulip look well worth it for saving quite a bit of money over slack for a fair sized company though.
The responses from people here are really interesting.
From what i remember - Rocketchat was based on meteor, which seemed dying at the time + it was computing hungry and clients were especially hungry. - Mattermost worked for a time but you were not able to get mobile notifications without paying for license (not sure about now). Sounds suprising but it was just problem. - Zullip too many dependencies and complicated install.
Matrix is more of a standard than anything. The first server implementation is called Matrix Synapse written in python twisted. I had it running without issues on 512mb vps for 30 people org with SQLITE. When you need bigger scale Matrix has some go and rust server implementations, you can also use postgres etc.
I guess you should start with what scale you need and what features you need and go from there.
It's basically hosted Slack-using-riotchat/matrix.
Very cheap too. Most of the other open source providers (incl Zulip and Mattermost) almost cost the same as slack.
Only Synapse is usable though. Dendrite (Go+Kafka) is getting there, but Ruma (Rust) seems to have been stalled waiting for the programming language to stabilize.
A bunch of other cool open source projects use it, including Python Core, parts of the Rust community, MariaDB, Coala, the Lean Theorem Prover, the HL7 standard, and many more.
That's what I did. Thanks again to them, I really appreciate it.
Reddit was OK for awhile... I dislike the redesign because there are bugs with code formatting, and because the latency is worse. And it seems like they couldn't really make up their mind visually.
Actually Zulip is one of the lowest latency web apps I've used in recent memory!
I also have problems following IRC because of the lack of threading.
Here's our thinking. Topics within a stream are ordered by the time of the most recent message. We keep the complete history, both of messages and topics, because it's useful for search and following up on things. Personally, I regularly reply to a conversation whose last message was a month or more ago to follow up with new information (often after getting there from one of the permanent links in our issue tracker). Because the context is all there and available with just a single click on the topic, I find it to be a really nice workflow.
In Slack, most messages are a single line, and are very real-time. E.g. if a channel is getting 100 messages a day, and a conversation starts in the morning, you're not going to try to engage with that conversation even that afternoon.
In Zulip, communication is asynchronous by default. This has a lot of secondary implications; e.g. it means that by default you can assume people will see your message, rather than just the people that check in the next few hours. This means you can have substantive discussions on the platform, and the medium correspondingly encourages more multi-line, thoughtful posts. So we've currently decided that having to type an extra letter to compose is worth the tradeoff.
As an example, not having compose open by default allows us to use single letter keyboard shortcuts for navigation.
In any case,
* You can enable "Enter to send": https://zulipchat.com/help/enable-enter-to-send
* Private Messages (called DMs in Slack) in Zulip work the same way they do in Slack, with an open-by-default compose box.
We actually just had a discussion of it last week; the issue created from that is here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/10786
So it's becoming clear that the only revenue model going forward is open core model.
It's definitely possible to run a Zulip server with essentially no downtime. E.g. the main zulipchat.com service has had approximately 10 user-facing outages with a median duration of 5-10 minutes over the last 5 years (there was one while we still only had a few hundred users that lasted overnight), most of them in the middle of the night. Happy to talk more about this for anyone curious; there are some fun stories (like migrating from MySQL to Postgres as our primary database technology with <30 minutes of downtime early in its development).
We don't have a public uptime SLA for zulipchat.com uptime yet, but we're happy to make them for individual customers (and I suppose we should add one).
If you're self-hosting, our commercial support offerings will help you setup your servers in a way that achieves your uptime goals; because Zulip is so stable, usually folks just go with a hot spare (our enterprise customers generally only report downtime related to server upgrades, which is usually avoidable).
Am I reading the docs correctly in that email is absolutely required? I haven't checked thoroughly for this new release, but previously it was for missed message notification as well as account creation, if I'm remembering right.
It's not a for profit place, so I'm simply looking to self host, sans email, to make communication easier across the teams. Current solution is definitely inferior to Zulip!
Send a message in "#production help" in chat.zulip.org if you have trouble figuring it out, and I'll extend the docs until you can get it working.
I don't think I would have located this option while filtering for "works without email, and I'm okay missing messages". If it was present a year ago I definitely didn't. Very glad it's a supported corner case!
git shortlog -ns
git shortlog -sn --no-mergesMore on their homepage - https://zulipchat.com/
On the bottom of the page, it reads:
Tim Abbott is the lead developer of the Zulip open source
project. He previously was CTO of Ksplice and then Zulip
Inc. (before it was acquired by Dropbox).Here’s an Techcrunch article from Mar 17, 2014 [1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-s...
[1] https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus...
It seems a bit like a slakey zulip to me, though I haven’t had opportunity to use it yet.
But of course that's not to say that there is anything wrong with the quality of the product being promoted here.
"Zulip now has an IRC bridge powered by matrix.org"
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
(not saying this is the case here, just that it shouldn't be a concern)
What are the steps involved? For us, it's "tap the phone icon in the top right".
But this comment on the zuplipchat web site https://zulipchat.com/security/ feels like a pretty gross generalisation and detracts from Zulip's vibe IMO:
> With many SaaS providers, essentially all engineers have direct shell access to production servers storing user data. Zulip Cloud is different: only a small handful of security-trained engineers have access to production servers or to sensitive customer data.
I really appreciate the feedback!
For me it's Zulip Topics - they make it very easy to organize the communication. You have channels and they contain topics. This is one of the most useful features of Zulip.
Most features of all chat clients (riot, slack, mattermost, rocket.chat, zulip) are pretty similar.
Has this been fixed/improved?
I really don’t understand it myself, since it looks more or less the same as other apps, but my instinctual reaction is still ‘yuck!’.
- The UI looks better the more streams you are subscribed to
- The UI just "works"
I'm still not sure if the UI works because it is not distracting me with good looks ;)
I hang out on freenode every day. But I have higher expectations of chat in 2018 when it comes to what I would choose for an actual organization. So does everyone else.
IRC isn't blowing anyone's mind. Especially that first time they try to reply to someone but their message is never received because the other person closed their laptop.