It’s formally official. I simply turned off our final Slack integration. We’re now not asserting new episodes there. It’s been greater than six months since we invited Zulip’s Alya Abbott on the pod and determined to kick the tires to see if Zulip might substitute Slack for Changelog’s neighborhood. The reply has been a powerful YES! Right here’s why.
As an alternative of itemizing all the explanations Slack wasn’t working nice for us, I’ll preserve it constructive and checklist the explanations Zulip is working nice. 💚
🤲 Zulip is open
Zulip is open in so some ways. It’s open supply, it’s open to contribution, and it even hosts its personal chat within the open, which is completely rad.
The open chat is powered by a very cool function the place you may choose in to public entry on a channel-by-channel foundation. We adopted their lead. See our public conversations proper right here.
?Zulip can be open to being self-hosted, which we aren’t doing, however it’s good to have the choice out there if/after we change our thoughts!
🧵 Zulip is threaded
Zulip is chat, however it’s not only one lengthy stream of messages. Every message belongs to a subject. That’s feels like a small factor, however it makes an enormous distinction in observe. There’s one thing about having to cease and suppose about the place your message belongs (and doubtlessly creating a brand new matter) earlier than posting, which produces greater high quality conversations. It’s a nudge away from noise and towards sign.
Threads additionally match properly into our neighborhood as a result of most dialog is in response to one thing mentioned on an episode. We use the Zulip API to auto-create a brand new matter for every episode, which doubles as an announcement of contemporary content material.
Moreover, not everybody listens to a podcast episode on the identical time. In Slack, it was unimaginable to hearken to an older episode, then go see what the neighborhood needed to say about it. With Zulip, you simply dig up the related matter and have at it. You possibly can even reboot an previous dialog should you like!
🙌 Zulip is neighborhood
We wished to pay for Slack for years, however their pricing mannequin made it clear that it’s not designed for communities like ours. The Zulip staff, then again, is targeted on investing in neighborhood and mentorship. Towards that finish, they sponsor Zulip Cloud Commonplace internet hosting for open supply initiatives, analysis teams, schooling, non-profits and different communities.
They have been even type sufficient to sponsor our Changelog neighborhood, which we actually respect!
🎭 Zulip is a combined bag
The late, nice Jim Weirich used to say that you simply don’t actually know a expertise till you’ve used it in anger. We’ll, we’ve been utilizing Zulip lengthy sufficient now to have skilled each its professionals and its cons, its magnificence marks and its warts, its virtues and its sins.
Right here’s a listing of different issues I like/dislike about Zulip, that you could be discover useful knowledge factors when evaluating it:
- Like: The REST API is simple to hack towards
- Dislike: The URLs are tremendous ugly (instance)
- Like: Plain ol’ Markdown for message formatting
- Dislike: The iOS app design is mid (the brand new one as properly?)
- Like: There’s so many keyboard shortcuts
- Dislike: Emoji help is fundamental
👀 See you in Zulip
Solely a fraction of our previous Slack neighborhood moved with us into Zulip, but the conversations we’re having now are so significantly better it’s virtually laughable. Be a part of us! It’s a completely free and enjoyable place to hang around.
