Speaking as a *heavy* user of the Rust and Lean zulip instances, I find it a huge improvement over the alternatives of Gitter and Discord, and I think IRC although I have not used IRC much. It takes some getting used to, but the topic threading is absolutely essential once you reach a certain size. Looking at other chat platforms, overlapping conversations are a major problem when you have more than around 10 people online at once. Rust routinely has 50 or more online at once, and channels help but even then you will have multiple topics in a single channel, and that extra level of organization is absolutely warranted. It also helps when you want to look back at the discussion (or even just find it again!) or continue an old conversation from a year ago. Most of these activities I couldn't even imagine doing in a Gitter/Discord style chat platform.

I have no stake in this discussion, but I thought I should balance out the Zulip downvotes with some positive experiences. (Also, I would definitely be more likely to participate on a haskell Zulip than an IRC or Matrix instance, FWIW.)

Mario Carneiro

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 9:58 PM Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

I definitely find Zulip confusing and have failed to use it every time I’ve tried 

If normal threading is lasagna layers, Zulip threading is like trying to hold cooked spaghetti in your ha d. 

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 2:40 PM Alex Rozenshteyn <rpglover64@gmail.com> wrote:

(I'm a little ashamed that I lurk on this list but the thing that brings me out of lurking is a post on communication technologies)

Not Zulip.

Please not Zulip.

I've used Zulip once many years ago, and once this year. Both times, its interface felt clunky, and it felt like it was trying to get the best of IRC, Slack, and a BBS and instead getting the worst of all the worlds. Synchronous communication was confusing, asynchronous communication was limited, and topics and channels didn't really do anything to organize things.

I have two alternatives to add to consideration:

* Mattermost: it's an open-source clone of Slack, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but at least it's familiar and heavily used UI

* Discourse: it's an asynchronous communication tool, but that may acceptable or preferable, and there is already a Haskell Discourse set up (https://discourse.haskell.org/)

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 11:59 AM Ben Gamari <ben@well-typed.com> wrote:

Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald@gmail.com> writes:

> I personally vote for irc.  Perhaps via Libera.
>
> What are some example vibrant  technical communities on matrix? I’ve
> experienced such on irc but less so via more recent / newer platforms
>
I know that many subcommunities within the Rust community use Matrix. I
have had quite good interactions in this context. Frankly I think that
most of these newer options are technically much more conducive to
technical collaboration than IRC.

Cheers,

- Ben

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