And another useful resources might be the Rust “Zulip shortcomings” post - it’s a place where they’re keeping track of issues / annoyances / etc with Zulip:
Probably also worth noting there is that they note Zulip being open source means they could try fixing these problems themselves
so, what are you guys thinking about discord? i found this page because i was searching for a discord server for jupyter and that lead me here. discord is so convenient!
Looks like I am late to the party! I can provide a Zulip endorsement.
I did try Zulip, and Slack, and Mattermost, Rocketchat and Zoom(chat) with a small team (15 people) over a week each: each tool was the only chat communication used for a week, and as this happened during the COVID times, the role of the chat tools was pretty important.
I don’t know Discord well enough (so please correct me if I am wrong here) but the openness of Zulip seems a key feature of Zulip that I find important to consider: the source is available, I can export my server data and host my own server if desired. The new ‘web-public’ channels make discussions searchable on the Internet, which seems important for a project like Jupyter (where support queries and answers need to be easily findable so that the support activity scales for growing use numbers).
For power users, the Zulip design is fantastic. The tagging of discussions with topics is a game changer so that the chat is more than just ephemeral: it becomes searchable and information exchange is re-usable. That’s a killer feature for me. The assigning of topics is flexible, and can be adjusted later: it is thus not necessary that every user fully understands the Zulip topic model. The Zulip app can be controlled just with the keyboard (for those who try to reduce mouse/trackpad usage).
Given that zulip.com now offers hosting of Zulip instances without limitations (!) for free for open source projects (and as Zulip itself is open source, there cannot be a tie-in, at least not an effective one), I would definitely give that a go for open source projects. I’d be delighted if Jupyter wanted to try this.
