But how ntfy does it then? It is one app that allows you to subscribe to multiple different notification endpoints. I have uptime notifications set up this way.

Wouldn't it be possible for Zulip to go this route as well?

The solution for this is to install the self-hosted Zulip as a PWA, but unfortunately they don't support web push.

> 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

Setting up stoat.chat right now, I'll let you know if I have any notification issues with it ...

I understand that (IIUC in Matrix the client decides what push gateway to use, and the Element client just hardcodes matrix.org and lets anyone use it for free), but it doesn't really do much for my practical concerns. I'm looking for something my users can tolerate (which means no monthly fee) and that I can be reasonably confident won't rugpull us or vanish in the next ~10 years.

> because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary

Nope. On iOS the flow is:

1. Generate a "push token" on the device (with the user's approval).

2. Send this token to your server.

3. Now you can send notifications to the device via this token. Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account. But it's not linked to an individual app.

The situation is different on Android. Google went out of their way to make it impossible to customize `google-services.json` at runtime. So the built-in "easy" flow won't work. But notifications ultimately work using veeeeery obfuscated remote procedure calls to Google Play Services and you can run them manually. I need to do a write-up about this....

>Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp.

Yet we don’t pay for Linux, grep, vim, etc, etc. Why is your open source project the only one worthy of requiring payment?

IMO you should drop the doublespeak of claiming these are open source values while simultaneously charging money. It’s offensive to people who contribute to actual open source projects like matrix, clang, Linux, kubernetes, and on and on.

Thanks for the response. I'll discuss it w/ my users.

> That said, I'd like to push back on the idea that charging businesses for a tool that's an important part of their daily work "breaks the seal". Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp. And Zulip's full-time development team should be able to make a living building ethical FOSS software.

I think you touched on the sort of thing I'm concerned about with your mention of enshittification, though I think you're probably right that VC funding is involved in most cases. It is good to know that you've been at it for a decade and have (apparently) built a sustainable business selling a product people like.

My concerns (which I hope are understandable) aside, I certainly support your right to charge money for what you've made, as I said here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953048).

I'm sorry, would you rather I had framed this post as an aggressive critique of the Zulip developers without addressing my own context? I think anyone who has seriously tried to use Matrix as a chat app rather than a chat app but also an expression of one's principled preferences for federation, decentralization, and e2ee everywhere will know exactly what I'm talking about.

I don't mean to shit on Matrix either. It's a hard set of problems they set out to solve, and Matrix is usable and legitimately self-hostable.