Zulip chat

[Ethan C]

Hi everyone!

We (me, Gregory, Riccardo, Damian, and a few others) are currently testing out a new chat system named Zulip. It's similar in scope to other team chat solutions like Slack, Mattermost, and Rocket.Chat, but it has a good threading model (all messages are in threads, and they can be moved between threads) and is quite mature. We decided to try out a new chat system, because (1) we need a more real-time communication system than mailing lists, and (2) we found that Discord was useful, but Zulip would be more configurable and would not require using nonfree software.

It has a web client, a desktop client (which is a wrapper around the web client), a React Native mobile client, and an experimental Flutter mobile client. The React Native mobile client and the Flutter mobile client are also able to receive push notifications. You can receive email notifications, too. (Note: You should not download the client from F-Droid unless you don't have Google Play Services, as the F-Droid builds have push notifications disabled due to requiring the proprietary Google Play Services).

We can set up things like archiving the chats to a public website and mirroring discuss-gnustep to a channel, which could be quite useful. These integrations are easy to set up.

You can join our Zulip instance at https://gnustep.zulipchat.com/join/sdwgq3wsotq6hnosat2zynn4/.

(sorry, I thought I had sent this out in July, but it turns out it was just sitting in my Drafts folder for more than a month.)