from Hacker News

Our Slack is dead. Long live Zulip

by Cyphase on 5/10/25, 2:24 AM with 22 comments

  • by emptysongglass on 5/10/25, 3:53 AM

    Zulip committed the cardinal sin of stripping out notification support from their mobile apps for anyone not paying to force people to pay them.

    Every other messaging app out there that is open source covers the minimal costs associated (and for Zulip, with an unpaid userbase that is tiny, these costs are laughably small) to host the infra associated. Note that Firebase Cloud Messaging itself is free. Wire, Signal, Threema, every single XMPP app, Element: none of these force users to build and distribute modded apks just to get notifications.

    It was a tactic and it sucked and it burned any and all goodwill I had for Zulip.