from Hacker News

Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

by joeclef on 9/25/15, 6:53 PM with 313 comments

  • by kevinr on 9/25/15, 10:20 PM

    We've been using Zulip internally for a couple of years now. We've used IRC and Jabber, looked at Slack and Hipchat and Skype and Lync, and somehow keep coming back to Zulip. It lets us have real, ongoing, and substantive conversations, with a large number of participants, without being overwhelmed.

    I sometimes feel like Twitter is actually a better comparison for Zulip than Slack---in Zulip like on Twitter, it's easy to watch and participate in multiple conversations at the same time. Zulip's threading model exists somewhere between Slack's rigid "rooms" model and Twitter's everything-is-public model, so it's much lighter-weight to participate in multiple places at once than on Slack but it's also easier than on Twitter to have the right conversation with the right people without bothering others with something irrelevant to them. And Zulip's threading model makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space without stepping on each others' toes or getting distracted.

    Our remote folks rely on it particularly heavily. When Zulip got acquired it was our remote employees and their managers who were showing up outside my cube with pitchforks when I breathed a word of turning it off. It gives folks in other offices or working from home a watercooler and a way to virtually tap a group of coworkers lightly on the shoulder when they need help.

    Basically we can't live without it, so I'm super-excited to see it finally open sourced. Thanks for making it happen. :-)

  • by tbingmann on 9/25/15, 7:24 PM

    Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

  • by krig on 9/25/15, 9:45 PM

    "You can install a Zulip server on a system with 2G of RAM, but for production use we recommend a system with 4GB of RAM or more."

    Something has gone horribly wrong when a chat server can barely run on 2G.

    edit: As a frame of reference, here's what Inspire IRCd needs:

    > A network with 3000-4000 locally connected clients and 10000 open channels experiences a constant 1-4% CPU use with 70MB of RAM use. This won't go up drastically, but it will go up. Around 40000 local clients means you'll be expecting some 500MB of RAM. [1]

    [1]: http://www.inspircd.org/wiki/FAQ.html

  • by on_ on 9/25/15, 7:49 PM

    Smart play. If they can lock people in to their free chat client they can get a stronger foothold into enterprise and servicing smaller start-up/SMB companies. This is what Paul Graham talks about building an e-mail client, just call it a todo list.

    This is a storage application front-end. Slack and hipchat charge the money for secure storage, file transfer and data. That is Dropbox's competitive advantage and a great way to break into the market discreetly.

    Client looks cool, I will be downloading it.

  • by SwellJoe on 9/25/15, 7:25 PM

    I was just about to try out Mattermost for our company communications. It integrates with a few things including gitlab, but Zulip seems to have a larger number of integration options, which is awesome. Anybody tried both and have thoughts on them?

    I still prefer to host my own infrastructure, and I want to be able to archive and categorize a discussion (after it's happened) for searchability, but a couple of our people want an alternative to email and Google Hangouts for communications, and are pushing for Slack or XMPP. I've never been a big chat user and another of our people doesn't do chat at all (so we'd likely need some kind of email gateway for him). I'm not convinced anything exists that answers all these needs, but maybe I'm just way out of the loop.

    Also, do any of these integrate with XMPP? Googling is inconclusive, but it seems neither connects to XMPP directly, which is unfortunate. I'd like to see an open standard backing whatever chat we choose.

  • by jonathanwallace on 9/25/15, 7:34 PM

    No plan9?!?!? I'm disappointed. :/

    https://www.zulip.org/clients.html

  • by manigandham on 9/25/15, 9:54 PM

    Side note: Please STOP using tiny font weights. Text becomes ridiculously hard/painful to read.

    There's no reason to use a font-weight of 200 (or anything less than 500) on body text, save that for the headlines.

    http://i.imgur.com/r7a794n.png

  • by mansilladev on 9/25/15, 9:19 PM

    So, if you're going to tool around, and think, "Hey, I've got an Ubuntu/Debian box laying around" -- you best just follow the repo README advice and do this on a virtual box. The server install scripts have some heavy dependencies (puppet, django), if the "sudo -i" wasn't a clue enough. Also, if you are doing this, /root/zulip/scripts/lib/install's wgets need some "--no-check-certificate" flags. When I get zulip server stood up I'll post my IP.

  • by jnpatel on 9/25/15, 11:46 PM

    I haven't yet tried Zulip's threading model, but I can certainly say I'm not pleased with Slack's.

    It can be very frustrating to try and trace a conversation backwards in a crowded Slack channel. I haven't used IRC in a while, but at least my client had a feature to toggle highlighting on a back-and-forth conversation, but that wasn't perfect.

  • by dang on 9/25/15, 9:35 PM

  • by sinak on 9/25/15, 9:38 PM

    My one big question is: does Zulip support push notifications to the next version of the mobile app if you self-host the server?

    I'm not exactly sure how that'd be possible, but I wonder if they've managed to figure it out somehow. It's the one big problem with self-hosted chat apps like Rocket.chat and others - APNS and GCM are both centralized, and it's hard to federate them to provide push services for self-hosted instances of open source projects.

  • by paste0x78 on 9/25/15, 7:12 PM

    2015 The year of the chat clients

  • by stepmr on 9/25/15, 7:48 PM

    Any idea why this uses a forked version of Django? I read through docs and skimmed the repo but couldn't find anything that speaks to this...

  • by gregwtmtno on 9/25/15, 7:50 PM

    For those wondering, it's Apache license.

  • by tracker1 on 9/25/15, 8:38 PM

    I'm curious on the separate uses of Redis, RabbitMQ and Memcached... it seems these uses could all just use Redis. And have a lower overall memory/cpu footprint to boot.

  • by cdixon on 9/26/15, 12:07 AM

  • by muyuu on 9/25/15, 10:31 PM

    "The Zulip desktop app is a C++ application written with the Qt toolkit. It is a lightweight wrapper around a Webkit web view: it loads the zulip webapp as a single page full-screen webpage. The desktop app provides some native integrations: tray icon and Dock support, notifications, and more."

    Wouldn't it be better if the multi-platform wrapper for Webkit web view was a separate project? Should be useful, if it doesn't exist already.

  • by dingdingdang on 9/25/15, 7:26 PM

    Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..). Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size.

  • by bachmeier on 9/25/15, 7:53 PM

    Looks wonderful, but am I the only one that thinks the recommended 4 GB server is a lot?

  • by tommoor on 9/25/15, 7:19 PM

    Dropbox has great designers, surprised they couldn't have found a few hours to spruce this up in the year and a half since it was acquired :)

  • by e12e on 9/26/15, 2:54 AM

    A couple of Zulip questions:

    1) Is there any support for federation? At first glance it looks like every installation might have multiple servers, but more for balancing load, than federation?

    2) How well is the protocol specified? How hard would it be to par down the requirements to eg: just python and sqlite/lmdb or redis (or zodb...)? Say if one wants to support just ~100 users or so?

  • by zobzu on 9/25/15, 9:49 PM

    It looks cool that said as usual its "hey I dont like <insert some chat program> so im just going to code my own incompatible one".

    In the end im happy with IRC. Its not the greatest but its the one that just works: Its the one everyone who's an engineer in the business knows how to use, bots work, automation work, and irccloud works if you like webuis.

  • by darkarmani on 9/26/15, 8:38 PM

    Wow. Good luck installing this. I'm not touching it. It needs to do all sorts of hokey things to work. It needs puppet and git to work? You can't just install python packages, it installs them from a ppa. Deployment is a huge mess. It doesn't have to be this hard.

  • by ctingom on 9/25/15, 9:23 PM

    No mention of Skype? It seems like every one of my business contacts is using Skype to chat.

  • by pjtr on 9/26/15, 6:24 AM

    What do Zulip / Slack / Hipchat / IRC / ... people do for screensharing and (group) voice calls?

    We'd love the chat improvements, but without screensharing and voice we're stuck on Skype. :(

  • by alkonaut on 9/26/15, 2:19 PM

    Has anyone switched workplace chat from skype to something else? I don't much like the chat bits in Skype but on the other hand the voice bit is fantastic. I can't imagine having to manage two separate contact lists for chat and voice, so I'm reluctant to switch to something that doesn't have good voice or integrates with something that has (e.g. launch group call from a chat conversation).

  • by aikah on 9/26/15, 12:15 AM

    Nice, it looks like an excellent Django app to study.

  • by mrmondo on 9/25/15, 10:50 PM

    Good to see it be open sourced. I'm disappointed there's no XMPP gateway, OTR chat encryption or Gitlab integration however.

  • by lisianne on 9/25/15, 11:02 PM

    Wow. Great news. Very good alternative to slack.

  • by mnx on 9/25/15, 8:40 PM

    The 'Or use the web app' link on the frontpage links to the list of desktop clients instead of the web app.

  • by Drdrdrq on 9/25/15, 8:51 PM

    No linux client? That's a deal breaker for us right there... Pity, looks interesting otherwise.

  • by taesu on 9/25/15, 7:09 PM

    is this something like slack?

  • by mapletune on 9/26/15, 11:37 AM

    Does anyone know if Zulip has support for directory integration? whether it's OpenLDAP or MS AD. Hell, even RADIUS would be ok by me... @@

  • by BradRuderman on 9/25/15, 7:44 PM

    Why did Dropbox build this? Why didn't they just use Slack? What were the features slack was missing or were there other business reasons?

  • by jayzalowitz on 9/25/15, 9:21 PM

    #googlewave

  • by reeboblue on 9/28/15, 5:10 PM

    Anyone have recommendations for a free SSL cert provider so that I can test this out?

  • by moreorless on 9/26/15, 6:56 PM

    Those bastards!! Got me all excited with the Plan 9 tease. ;(

  • by ausjke on 9/25/15, 11:38 PM

    indeed a great move, the part I don't get is that why dropbox acquired it then opensource it? what's the logic behind this...

  • by orliesaurus on 9/26/15, 5:36 AM

    No one mentioned gitter.im, weird...

  • by nornagon on 9/25/15, 8:43 PM

    Reminds me of https://euphoria.io

  • by benwilber0 on 9/26/15, 7:08 AM

    who cares. seriously. group chat is a solved problem.

  • by misiti3780 on 9/25/15, 7:50 PM

    looks like a great codebase, both django and ios!

  • by relaxitup on 9/26/15, 7:55 AM

    LDAP support?

  • by mahouse on 9/25/15, 8:36 PM

    Someone should tell those web developers choosing those fonts that not everybody has a damn Mac.

    https://i.imgur.com/MciirNR.png

  • by vegabook on 9/26/15, 8:44 AM

    Is it possible to have secure chats that the server cannot read?

  • by kirmerzlikin on 9/25/15, 9:20 PM

    cool