It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.

I really wanted to like Zulip and use it as a personal chat service for a small group and it was exactly that feature that made it basically unsuitable. Forcing everything into titled threads did not make any sense for lots of user to user interactions that are ad-hoc in nature.

I didn't think it was terrible software by any stretch of the imagination - just not really suitable for informal communication.

> It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.

Do you mean people are happy to post on a thousand different threads, but no one reads posts from anyone else?

Why do you even have so many different active threads? Why not just let "resolved" threads be, and funnel conversations into fewer threads? (esp if you want ephemerality i.e. conversations to expire with time)

> 300+ members in a makerspace

If you have 300+ people discussing a wide variety of things, how do you ever expect to maintain your sanity with only channels and without threads? Won't every channel be quickly flooded and really hard to resurface anything useful from past discussions?

> I cannot [...] unless I have elevated access

Is your complaint that your Zulip space is not moderated well and that it would be helpful to ad-hoc decentralize some of the maintenance work across more participants?

> If they wanted to re-invent forums, they should have cloned the "discourse" web app/forum.

Zulip was founded in 2012, Discourse was released in 2014.