| 24 May 2025 |
 emily | I know Zulip blurs the line to some extent, but some people really like chat and some people really like forums and some people like both for different things (I'm in that camp) | 11:08:22 |
| emily | I don't think we should aim to blur them too much :) | 11:08:29 |
| emily | (thankfully the Matrix mobile apps also suck…) | 11:08:46 |
| emily | like, you can stay up to date with the Discourse and read every post if you want to. you absolutely cannot keep up with the Matrix firehose | 11:09:10 |
| emily | both modes are important to the community and I think we should let them continue to coexist | 11:09:22 |
 uep | the latter point is .. fascinating. I really don't see it that way, and I think the idea that 'forums' get replaced with 'chat' (as is usually done very badly with discord) is a terrible outcome in general. But I also can see the point, even if I don't think it will work for new user and search accessibility in particular | 11:09:26 |
| emily | yeah I think we should really just assess things on the basis of being a chat replacement | 11:09:51 |
 infinisil | Yeah it's debatable :) | 11:09:59 |
| infinisil | I also like that idea because it means one less thing to maintain and moderate | 11:10:18 |
| uep | (i mean external search, of course) | 11:10:28 |
| emily | I think threading that actually works would be beneficial if it's a sensible threading model though. Matrix's threads kind of suck and also have bad client support but people try to use them here anyway and it usually goes badly | 11:10:37 |
| emily | I think we'd want a separate instance from governance probably? | 11:10:51 |
| emily | oh you mean merging Discourse and chat | 11:11:04 |
| emily | maybe yeah, though I think the moderation tasks for the two are pretty different | 11:11:15 |
| uep | zulip does threading really well, at least for highly technical and highly organised discussion. So much so that it's too structured for most people to use as "chat" | 11:11:44 |
| emily | right… I would count that against Zulip, if it does in fact make realtime chat harder | 11:12:10 |
| emily | (I haven't really used it much myself, to be clear. or Mattermost, or Rocket.Chat) | 11:12:20 |
| uep | though they have recently added a generic "no topic topic" that makes this somewhat better for ui and new users | 11:12:21 |
 Dylan | Zulip looks to be oriented towards teams not communities and the pricing seems like a non-starter considering nobody can get mobile notifications if that route was taken. I see nothing wrong with having live chat and less-live forums? | 11:12:27 |
| emily | the pricing is $0 | 11:12:38 |
| emily | for both cloud and self-hosted | 11:12:42 |
| Dylan | No? | 11:12:47 |
| emily | self-hosted we get access to their push notifications for $0 because FOSS | 11:12:49 |
| emily | cloud we get standard plan for $0 because FOSS | 11:12:54 |
| Dylan | https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted | 11:12:56 |
| emily | I have read the pages you are linking to | 11:13:01 |
| Dylan | Didn't know about the FOSS exception | 11:13:07 |
| emily | the server is FOSS | 11:13:07 |
| emily | the paid self-hosted stuff is for their push notifications server and support | 11:13:14 |
| emily | we would want push, but it's free for FOSS anyway | 11:13:22 |
