- ideally zero setup and maintenance. E.g. click "+" button to create instant server in Discord rather than install phpBB or vBulletin or mailing-list software
Zulip has a topic-threaded model that threads the needle between email threads and instant messaging in a way that's much better than Slack threads: https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics
- ideally open source if possible. Discourse is open-source but then you have to decide on SaaS hosting at $1200/yr (https://www.discourse.org/pricing) -- or pay for self-hosted costs.
> Ultimately, whenever an end user is frustrated that "FOSS project leaders don't do what I want them to do!" and wonder why they end up choosing Github Discussions or Discord ... it's the result of tradeoffs above. The hypothetical forum discussion software that makes all clients and admins happy doesn't exist.
It's a bit hard for me to understand why Zulip is so lightly represented in these discussions – for example I saw it mentioned in the TiddlyWiki thread you linked, but the talk seems to have tailed off and mysteriously settled on Discourse. Someone seems to have the incorrect idea that Zulip requires running your own instance of it; that's not the case.
My hypothesis here is that there's a decent level of groupthink which tends to reject perfectly available FOSS solutions in favor of equivalent proprietary ones because FOSS solutions have (perhaps rightly) gained a bad reputation over the years as being difficult to use and operate. My thesis in this thread is that it's high time we began re-evaluating that, and giving FOSS tools a fair chance rather than prematurely declaring them to be bad; especially in light of data portability concerns.
Let's take a FOSS solution like Zulip, and see if it satisfies some of the constraints you arrived at:
- ideally $0 cost
Zulip is free for OSS projects: https://zulip.com/for/open-source/
- ideally zero setup and maintenance. E.g. click "+" button to create instant server in Discord rather than install phpBB or vBulletin or mailing-list software
Yep, a one-click solution is available
- ideally have modern features https://forum.getodk.org/t/important-moving-from-google-grou...
Zulip has a topic-threaded model that threads the needle between email threads and instant messaging in a way that's much better than Slack threads: https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics
- ideally open source if possible. Discourse is open-source but then you have to decide on SaaS hosting at $1200/yr (https://www.discourse.org/pricing) -- or pay for self-hosted costs.
Yep, is Open Source. https://github.com/zulip/
> Ultimately, whenever an end user is frustrated that "FOSS project leaders don't do what I want them to do!" and wonder why they end up choosing Github Discussions or Discord ... it's the result of tradeoffs above. The hypothetical forum discussion software that makes all clients and admins happy doesn't exist.
It's a bit hard for me to understand why Zulip is so lightly represented in these discussions – for example I saw it mentioned in the TiddlyWiki thread you linked, but the talk seems to have tailed off and mysteriously settled on Discourse. Someone seems to have the incorrect idea that Zulip requires running your own instance of it; that's not the case.
My hypothesis here is that there's a decent level of groupthink which tends to reject perfectly available FOSS solutions in favor of equivalent proprietary ones because FOSS solutions have (perhaps rightly) gained a bad reputation over the years as being difficult to use and operate. My thesis in this thread is that it's high time we began re-evaluating that, and giving FOSS tools a fair chance rather than prematurely declaring them to be bad; especially in light of data portability concerns.