Hi ! So zulip is actually probably top of this list as the best self managed solution and I’m sorry if I conveyed that it was even near the same ballpark of some of the others. I actually think it’s pretty neat. Interestingly the thing that made us spin down our zulip instance after ten minutes was the “async conversations”. I understand this is a core differentiator for zulip but it immediately felt like the teams channel threading which none of us can stand. The intentions are noble, and the implementation is way better than teams, but it’s interesting to me that solutioning for preventing things from getting buried became the core UX philosophy at play. Really there is something that just works with an absolutely straight forward chronological list of chat messages used in conjunction with a capable search indexer. It’s not that we aren’t willing to try new paradigms, we have tried this paradigm. For a while now. Our topic’d channels are a ghost town these days, our entire org has just moved to making group chats in teams that serve as channels and pinning them because it’s just way easier to work together with regular chat. Ironically we fail to respond to things and struggle more to find things in a topic/threaded paradigm as it seems to go a little too far in isolating “noise”. A lot of serendipitous participation and aha moments and memes come from just glancing a chat discussion that might not immediately involve your attention, and we just operate way better in the open chat space needing only channels/members for the right amount of organization.
I also found the Zulip UX to be really confusing at first. The issue is messages show up in multiple places which is unintuitive for someone with a spacial brain like me. What I do (because I use Zulip every day) is read messages only in their threads. I click on one thread in the sidebar, get caught up, then move to the next thread. (This is also how I use Discord and Slack.) So I treat it as if channels contain threads which contain messages.
But Zulip’s default view is a list of all messages in all threads in all channels which has no context for the individual messages, like
Zulip's product lead here. Yep, reading messages thread by thread is the recommended way for most folks. (There's even a keyboard shortcut for going to the next one.) The inbox view, which lists the threads where you have unread messages, is the default home view (unless your org admins changed that setting).
The combined feed is helpful for some (e.g., in lower-traffic organizations, or if you like to see messages as they come in), and was the default home view many years ago.
