Zulip is a team chat app, broadly similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

When the Future of Coding community started considering Slack alternatives earlier this year, I was reminded that Zulip exists. They didn’t end up moving to it, but I got interested.

The Changelog podcast migrated their community after an interview with one of the Zulip team, so I’ve been using it near daily for the last few months.

And you know what? It’s really excellent.

I am in several Slacks, for my day job and a couple of community groups. The difference when I open Zulip is noticeable. Zulip has a snappier and denser UI. But it’s the way messages are grouped into topics that makes it really easy to ignore a bunch of messages that I don’t need to read. That makes it much faster to get a broad sense of “what’s happening” and then focus on chats I actually care about.

On a personal level, I wish groups with ideological commitments would consider supporting Zulip, a small independent company funded by its customers whose owners are intimately involved in building the product. Rather than Slack (sold to Salesforce) or Discord (raised hundreds of millions of dollars).

I really hope to see more communities and companies considering Zulip as a viable alternative to the corporate players.

Filed under:techzulip

Many people in tech are obsessed with exponential growth. But I wonder…

Are things which look like exponential growth always the spread of an idea between humans? Are they always ideas whose implementation can be easily parallelized or distributed, so that as the idea spreads, the growth of its implementation is not bottlenecked?

Where the growth of an idea was not exponential, was that because its implementation couldn’t proceed in a decentralised way? Was it because the material resources needed for its implementation weren’t already widely available, ready to be put to use?

Is the end of exponential growth (the top of the S curve) due to saturation of the idea among humans?

Filed under:tech