We used Zulip (then a commercial product) at FoundationDB, and really liked it. We had teams in two cities.
The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about.
But IMO the killer feature is the "all messages" view that merges chosen streams in more or less chronological order. It makes it much easier to keep up with what you care about asynchronously without throwing everything into a single stream. And therefore it is easier to put down, and to use notifications very selectively, which mitigates some of the major downsides of company chat.
I haven't used Slack recently either, but as I understand it its "all unreads" feature is much clunkier.
I haven't used a recent version, but I would definitely consider using it again.
Same here. We're a company with about 50 people and deal with a lot of operational chatter. The threading model of Zulip works really great for us.
Before Zulip we used XMPP for a long time, then Mattermost for a short time (the threading model in mattermost didnt work at all for us), then moved to Zulip and never looked back. I definitely recommend Zulip.
> The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about.
Does anyone have experience how this compares to the threading in Flowdock? I like their threading the best between the ones I've tried, but it doesn't allow you to skip or hide threads that aren't useful to you.
I'm still somewhat baffled by Slack's popularity as it's almost as bad as IRC on larger groups.
As news about Slack becomes fewer and farther in-between, reminders of how much more usable Flowdock was also fade from view. I'm left with a dead emptiness in my heart and a general pessimism about corporate communications.
Is there _any_ service with Flowdock style threading now? XMPP clients? Game chats?
Unfortunately they've taken a left turn on the quality front, at least for the iOS app. It was unmaintained and slightly buggy, but then it became maintained and slow, power-hungry, and extra-buggy, and new versions usually don't make it better. At least the macOS desktop app is still based on WebKit rather than Electron, so it doesn't guzzle battery.
They've added some handy features, and there are more in the pipeline, but the current mobile experience is so bad that I'm having trouble not looking at alternatives. This despite the threading and content model (inbox divorced from chat is amazing) that has kept me very loyal for a very long time.
Back on topic, I really enjoyed Zulip as well. It wasn't perfect, but it very much did feel like they were actually getting the marriage of email and chat closer to right. Slack just feels like a shitty chat client that uses all of my RAM.
The threading, which they sell as the core feature, is nice, and does make it more usable for "important" conversations than purely chronological chat. It also makes it easier to screen out conversations you don't care about.
But IMO the killer feature is the "all messages" view that merges chosen streams in more or less chronological order. It makes it much easier to keep up with what you care about asynchronously without throwing everything into a single stream. And therefore it is easier to put down, and to use notifications very selectively, which mitigates some of the major downsides of company chat.
I haven't used Slack recently either, but as I understand it its "all unreads" feature is much clunkier.
I haven't used a recent version, but I would definitely consider using it again.