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
@andrew_chou I think my main complaint with Matrix is that it starts getting super slow as the number of chats you enter and the number of people in those chats grows. Having hudreds of channels with thousands of participants means that Element takes like 20-30 seconds to load and freezes the page while it does so. :P
Probably optimizations that can be made to improve the situation, but it's not great by default.
Fluffychat is a little faster, but can still end up waiting a few seconds to load