I’ve started working at a company that uses Zulip and it’s by far the best thought out UX I’ve ever worked with in a communications app. Sure there’s some polish needed but the general structure just lets me get to where I want, gives me an overview of everything going on, and generally makes me happy. I wish for more keyboard shortcuts maybe, and the mobile app needs the recent conversations view, but I’m sure they’ll get there.
> recent conversations

I wish Zulip (and other apps) provided an inbox instead of just ephemeral notifications that disappear once a message is viewed. Lack of inbox means that I have to use unread messages as a way to manage my inbox -- because the moment I click on a notification / take a quick peek at a message there's no easy way to mark it for coming back to later.

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+100 for Zulip though; by far the sanest messaging experience for this kind of context.

There is an Inbox view which you can make a default. You can also turn on setting to not mark messages as read automatically
I just had a look. I can absolutely understand parent. I’d want an option to include read messages in the inbox, not avoid marking as read. I want a history of stuff in my inbox, the same way discord, my RSS reader, and my email client work. All those have a read and unread state, but I can still see the read ones.
Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an initial shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things'.

The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I argue that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some getting used it.

As mentioned, Slack is way more polished.

What companies value can change after they’ve grabbed their share. Just like how OpenAI changed their “constitution” about working with others.

I wish there was a way to hold companies accountable for stuff like that.

Zulip being fully open-source and self-hostable helps this. It's what the Bluesky team have been calling "credible exit", and Zulip has it way more than Bluesky does.

On the other hand, I would love to see more tech companies being co-operatives, where their members get a say in governance. That'd be the ultimate hard-mode for a business that was dedicated to being rugpull-resistant.

As nice as zulips aspirations may be, every time i have to use it for a community i effectively stop interacting with them after a short while just because everything is janky, ugly and feels like a drag to interact with, just tried opening it on my phone to see if it improved but the header ui is just plain broken.
Could you explain please what exactly is broken? How is it jot working and what are your particular expectations?
hopefully zulip can become a slack/discord alternative
It already is!

(EDIT: unless your reason for using Discord is PTT voice channels. Then it's not.)

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