kind of wild how much better @zulip is than the other options as an overall product when it comes to realtime communication for groups.
- proper organizing of conversations with the right level of granularity
- open source and self-hostable
- run by an org that doesn't seem to be malicious in any way and thankfully lacks controversy 😄
- web-based but also available on most major platforms natively (they even have an official terminal UI client)
...and a bunch of other things, probably
Slack is fine for relatively small teams, but lacks proper organization of conversations.
Discord is decent but feels bloated and topic-based conversations isn't prioritized (although now they have forums that you can opt into I guess).
Telegram and Signal aren't even worth mentioning since they're a totally different kind of applications IMO - people stuff squares into circles by choosing those.
notably forgot to include Matrix, which seems great on paper but also has the same issues as Slack, Discord, etc from a communication standpoint.
Also, not really sure what the state of affairs is given their recent post about the org.
@andrew_chou I really enjoy matrix for the bridging aspect personally. I have all my slacks/discords/signals bridge there and then I can organize things into spaces based on what's actually useful.
Defs not a perfect tool either.
Hypha mostly uses Matrix and Slack with focused channels that people opt into which has been convenient.
@mauve yeah that seems like a nice arrangement! feels like it requires a good amount of discipline and some amount of tech savvy though. Easy to do with people you know, but when you start thinking about orgs or communities, I can't imagine it holds up well.
But yeah, definitely can see it growing in a direction that improves that aspect.
@andrew_chou Yeah, also just setting it up can be a pain in the ass. I tried to self host a bunch of times before I gave up and paid etke.cc to do the setup on my own digital ocean droplet
