Open source threaded team chat?! (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

We’re joined by Alya Abbott from Zulip, the open source, organized, threaded, team chat for distributed teams of all sizes. We talk about Zulip’s origins, how it’s open source, the way it’s led, no VC funding, what makes it different/better, how you can self-host it or use their cloud, moving to Zulip, contributing and being a part of the community…all the things.

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Sponsors:

• Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 100,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
• Paragon – Ship native integrations to production in days with more than 130 pre-built connectors, or configure your own custom integrations. Built for product and engineering. Learn more at useparagon.com/changelog
• Coder.com – Instantly launch fully configured cloud development environments (CDE) and make your first commit in minutes. No need to traverse README files or await onboarding queues. Learn more at Coder.com

Featuring:

• Alya Abbott – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Zulip - the open source, organized, threaded, team chat for distributed teams of all sizes
• chat.zulip.org
• Moving to Zulip
• zulip/zulip-terminal
• zulip/docker-zulip
• Flutter.dev

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

1. This is The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Sentry (00:01:26)

https://sentry.io/

3. Start the show! (00:03:12)

4. Zulip's big idea (00:06:49)

5. Channel vs Topic (00:09:26)

6. Live demo @ chat.zulip.org (00:13:23)

https://chat.zulip.org

7. Holding chat history hostage (00:19:22)

8. Pricing chat (00:23:36)

9. High quality and open source (00:27:30)

10. Sponsor: Fly.io (00:30:27)

https://fly.io/

11. Sponsor: Paragon (00:33:29)

https://www.useparagon.com/changelog

12. Biggest challenges (00:36:35)

13. Have you used Zulip? (00:42:05)

14. Moderation tools (00:45:05)

15. Moving to Zulip (00:47:41)

https://chat.zulip.org/help/moving-to-zulip

16. Set to public (00:53:08)

17. Public indexing? (00:53:56)

18. Self-hosting Zulip? (00:55:19)

19. Sponsor: Coder.com (01:02:57)

https://coder.com/

20. Zulip has a terminal app (01:06:35)

21. The Zulip team (01:10:03)

22. Why not raise funds? (01:13:52)

23. There's a lack of awareness (01:20:08)

24. Great documentation (01:26:04)

25. What's next? (Should we switch?) (01:26:42)

26. Closing thoughts and stuff (01:28:09)