rishig

My guess is most of the major chat players handle this pretty easily -- it's a non-starter for many potential users if you don't. Zulip stores all data indefinitely (including message edits, etc) in its default configuration.

In case anyone runs into this in the future, Zulip has a few features that could help:

* You can set a message retention policy that will delete each message after N days. (We're building the UI for it, but currently you can email [email protected] for help on turning it on.)

* On Zulip Cloud, you can set a message visibility limit that will save all your messages (e.g. for legal/compliance reasons), but only the last N messages will be visible to the team.

I believe it's the second :). (All replies from a channel go into a never ending thread that goes on forever.)

yup, Zulip is fully open source. I believe Mattermost is actually open core.

I agree that on the benchmark of time-to-send-a-message, Zulip is slightly slower than Slack, which is in turn slower than just putting the whole company in a WhatsApp group.

But the end goal is not sending messages, the end goal is getting the person who knows about the projector to see your message and respond, for you to see that response, etc.

In a moderately sized company, Slack is better than the WhatsApp solution, since you can direct the message at roughly the correct set of people, by spending the extra time to choose a channel. In turn, those people are more likely to get the message in time to act on it, because the message won't be buried under tons of messages meant for other people in the company.

Zulip takes that a step further, by adding subject lines to messages. The same tradeoff applies.

I think in the end the question really is how much more work it is to add the extra signal. The best case would be you could send messages like in WhatsApp (no subject line, and every message goes to the entire company), and read messages like in Zulip (subject lines, and with channels limiting audience). For both Zulip and Slack, the premise is that we can drive down the cost of adding the extra signal to low enough.

Got it, thanks for the concrete examples.

I think the short answer is that there is some learning curve to using Zulip, but once that's done, sending messages like that takes essentially the same amount of time it would in another product.

The actual extra actions are:

* up to one extra keystroke to open the compose box

* typing a subject line like "projector C13"

You wouldn't have to search for a topic to send a message like that; you would just start a new topic. And "what's up w/ the projector in C13?? I have a meeting" would still be a perfectly fine Zulip message.

And then on the receiving end, you actually save a bunch of time.

* There's a simple keyboard shortcut ('n') to see the message that just came in.

* The fact that there's a subject line means that everyone sees "projector C13" and decides if they're a person that can respond to that, even if they aren't caught up on the rest of the channel.

* If someone does respond, you can see that they responded to your message, and not to some other conversation that's going on in the channel. That makes it easier to keep an eye on the conversation while the rest of you is improvising a solution.

Zulip supports itself by selling hosting (at zulipchat.com) and support contracts for on-prem installations. Everything is a part of the open source project; no proprietary add-ons.

> when I looked, it seemed you got the complexity of serving 10k users even if you only had 100s.

haha, that's a good way to put it. We've put in a lot of work over the last few months to make Zulip easier to deploy for a team of 20.

> Last I looked, only rocket.chat had a sane, minimal docker-compose setup

Fair enough! It's on our roadmap, so hopefully we'll have it by the next time you're looking for a chat :).

Thanks for the feedback suyash. We're working on landing pages; weren't expecting a hacker news launch today :).