Mobile push notifications are a special case because it's literally not technically possible to self-host them. Or rather, it's possible if you build the iOS and Android apps from source and distribute them through TestFlight or an analogous Android channel, but it's not possible for the developer of an App Store or Play Store app to allow its users to point it at a different push-notification server, because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary. So if you want your self-hosted Zulip server to work with the Zulip client apps in the App Store and Play Store, you have to use Zulip's push server, and there's nothing Zulip can do to fix that.

Matrix works analogously; if you use the Element app from the App Store or Play Store, then you're using Element's push notification server, even if your Matrix homeserver is self-hosted. It's possible that Element allows their server to be used gratis in situations where Zulip charges a fee, I don't know their policies or anything, but in principle Matrix still leaves you exactly as dependent on a third party's goodwill unless you make your friends install a privately distributed mobile app.

Zulip IIUC does not restrict self-hosting of any feature that's technically possible to self-host.

Nevermind, stay with the one you hate.

> topics are so much better than "50 unread messages in #general"

my experience is exact opposite

(There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications).

Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0.

Some important context is that we retired the old React Native mobile app this summer in favor of the new Flutter apps (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...), which has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the app and developer experience.

But as you can imagine, the cutover and relentlessly addressing feedback after it took a lot of time for the mobile team. We've also experienced an AI slop bombardment in the last few months that has consumed a lot of time. I'll save that story for another time.

Thanks so much for sharing the story!

> hangringing

I’m sorry to be that guy but it’s “handwringing” - twisting your hand like you wring your clothes until you agree

What is the purpose of repealing this act? Make platforms liable and thus enact more restrictions, is that right?

Slack has basically one main hierarchy level (messages are grouped into channels) while Zulip has two, streams and topics. So you can create a stream for each project (say) and create a different topic for any given point that needs discussion about that project.

Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn’t get in the way of the other threads.

It depends on what you’re doing with the instance, where you and your users are located, etc.

If you create an invite-only Zulip chat for your pub trivia league or school parent association that’s all adults, probably not.

Onboarding has a thread going here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951401.

My understanding is that Campfire hasn't been actively developed for ~10 years (https://once.com/campfire/changelog shows some minor fixes after the OSS launch; their GitHub has no 2026 commits). There are no mobile apps. It is not an actively maintained Discord alternative.

Stoat is early in development. For example, https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat has 1421 commits, compared with 68K for https://github.com/zulip/zulip/. I wish them luck! It's really important that we have multiple independent efforts.

https://www.rocket.chat/ and https://mattermost.com/ are open-core military contractors these days. You'll see what I mean if you visit their websites. But like Zulip, they are full-featured team chat systems, and if the parts of their system that are OSS work for your organization, they're certainly valid options.

Finally there is Matrix/Element. They have an inspiring vision and similar values to mine, and I'd recommend checking it out. Element/Matrix is built on an ambitious distributed consensus protocol with an E2EE option, which provides capabilities Zulip don't have but also adds complexity. Zulip is focused on just doing team chat really well, and does not support more than ~100K users in an instance. Hopefully will have a lot more resources now, thanks to Current Events. I wish the Element team the very best of luck!

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Overall, Zulip's focus has always been on making a delightful chat experience, especially when you have multiple conversations happening at the same time. We aren't trying to build a clone, but instead the best possible experience for having lots of possibly complex conversations. So there will be some differences from what you're used to.

But critically, we spend a very large amount of our time relentlessly fixing micro-interactions that annoy us or are reported to us. If you read #design, #issues, and #feedback in https://zulip.com/development-community/, you'll get an idea of how we work.

So while there's some features we don't have that are present in other products, and we don't have dozens of designers on staff to do cool end-of-year animated reports like Discord does, you can expect few bugs and a lot of interaction design polish.

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The one mistake that I think a lot of folks make in evaluating options is focusing on buzzwords like E2EE without thinking through their threat model. E2EE doesn't add much practical security over self-hosting for many threat models, and it comes with significant usability trade-offs. And some current E2EE systems don't actually protect against a malicious server, say because they only protect message content, not metadata like who has access to what... just against raiding the server's disk.

(For example, WhatsApp has E2EE for message content, but I expect Meta's databases know everyone who's had a conversation with me on WhatsApp and the precise timestamps and approximate lengths of every message I've sent or received on the platform. And apparently some keyboard apps send what you're typing to remote servers!).

Awesome, feel free to start a thread in #integrations in chat.zulip.org! We'd be happy to chat about some of the things that will make your life easier to do carefully when writing a new client.

The main thing regards our double-entry API changelog system. Basically, the API documentation for individual endpoints, say https://zulip.com/api/get-user, natively cover for each endpoint all the changes relevant for that endpoint from https://zulip.com/api/changelog... and how to write nice code using feature level checks to support all server versions.

PTT = push to talk (at least that seems the most probable match on Wikipedia)

Doesn’t exist in Zulip, theres a “camera” button that generates a jitsi link, I tried (and failed) to make it a google meet link, but it works surprisingly well, though it is a context switch.

I'd say so, especially if you start on desktop and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video. We are satisfied with what we see with our internal usability studies with nontechnical users.

Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is this one:

https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/

> Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate with their team leads. “Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years.

I would recommend doing a little training/handholding call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true for any new app.

My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a signature, like you would an email. :)

Data point of one: in my small community group that has moved to Zulip we do have a grandma contributing. No jocks though so I can't speak to that.

I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how hyperactive the UI is.

Zulip "shells out" to other apps like Zoom or Jitsi for this with a light integration in the UI.

You can do everything with the keyboard, and we do write everything with screenreader accessibility and colorblindness accessibility in mind.

But we don't have a dedicated accessibility tester on staff, so we're reliant on people reporting issues that bother them in actual use.

I should also mention there's a nice TUI app: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal, which can be helpful for some people.

The built-in Jitsi integration lets you create a voice chat call via a single button click. You can also put those call links in a channel description if you like.

We do have plans to make the integration offer some additional ways to jump into a call, and have been talking about adding video chat. But our focus has been on building the best text chat possible, given there are multiple actively developed FOSS video call systems that we can integrate with.

Looks like it has integration with Jitsi Meet https://zulip.com/integrations/jitsi

Can you give more specific feedback -- what specifically are you looking at, and what specifically do you think contributes to it being noisy?

Last I checked, IRC wasn't really mobile-friendly. Greybeards held the spec back.

It has modern features. It stores message history. It has a fairly unique feature of letting you create ad-hoc "topics" (that go under a "Channel") that make it easier to manage the flood of conversation.

1: IRC loses all messages to you while you are not connected

Understandable, but sometimes there isn't a better alternative that doesn't do user support via Discord. That's why it's important to have alternatives that work, so unrelated companies don't pick centralized platform chat software that happens to be convenient for their immediate needs.

> enforcing the law

This is like believing DOGE was about efficiency :)

Yes, American Hitler is in fact Hitler perhaps you're cool with:

1. Extrajudicious execution of US citizens 2. Construction of concentration camps 3. Openly saying that you'll interfere with state elections 4. Openly saying you'll take away guns and dimish gun rights

Let's just be honest with ourselves. No one. And I mean no one, can support Donald Trump and be a principled decent human being, conservative or otherwise.

Then you're fucked, and stuck on big tech and hostile governments. If you can't convince friends to move, that is.

Thousands of people have put their pants on, had breakfast, gone to work, and then been intercepted by militarized federal agents, thrown to the ground, locked up in prison camps, then deported overseas.

Glad things are comfy for you though.

Fixed this for you: "I haven’t been affected, so everyone else is overreacting."

Well aren’t you just a special snowflake?

> I only scan the headlines

Have you scanned any headlines about ICE lately? Maybe do a quick search for news about Minnesota?

(I'm pretty sure that if you'd been putting your pants on in Minnesota, you would not have written this comment.)

If your eyes are closed, then things look the same whether you're in the middle of a calm meadow or on a highway about to be run over by a truck.

If you prefer not to look, maybe because you're convinced there's no truck, or you don't think it would help avoid the truck if there is one, fair enough. But the fact that your personal experience is unchanged is meaningless.

That's nice. Can I just get a photo of your ID so that I don't have to go through the pain of hacking it out of your wallet? Sounds like you have nothing to worry about, so it shouldn't be a problem.

While you're doing that, I'm going to be over here deleting my Discord data, installation and everything else that sides with it.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...