Zulip 12.0 Released

We tried Mattermost, Discourse and countless other, none were close in simplicity and features of Zulip. It's one of the best, underrated projects for that suits smaller teams.

I tried to use Zulip as _the_ interface for my personal AI assistant because its topic based memory model fits nicely for a personal assistant. But, the iOS app was barely useful to use daily. It lacked even basic features like the ability to create a topic/channel. I could not believe it would be the case and to my surprise, it was.. I have moved on to choose Rocket.chat for my needs. Choosing to implement E2E notifications over basic functions of a mobile app reinforces my decision to move away.

Sorry for the tone. It was a rant not to sound like an unthankful freeloader, but highlight the outsider perspective. The project can prioritize what they want of course.

There’s a thoughtful discussion in there about how AI has impacted the project. Not quite complementary but hopeful.

I like Zulip a lot, though its interface is a bit inscrutable.

Big fan of Zulip. We've self-hosted it at my company for 6 years without a single failure or issue.

Congrats on the release, and love the write up!

I’m increasingly thankful Zulip exists as an open source alternative to other collaborative platforms. In the age of agents, it feels like a huge advantage that folks can take a robust platform as a base and customize it to their needs (and hopefully contribute back)!

Also, thanks for sharing about your experiences with agent-based contributions, both internally and externally. Super fascinating.

Be well!

With what Google is doing with Android sideloading, I'm not sure Google is a good partner for open source projects. As it says in the blog post, Zulip has a nice history with Google Summer of Code, but it might be good to let this be the last year. Zulip currently supports sideloading. https://zulip.com/apps/android https://github.com/zulip/zulip-flutter#get-the-app That could get awkward later on. Though I guess if Zulip wants to remain in the Google Play Store, interaction with Google is unavoidable.