Minor follow-up on Zulip. Mainly of interest to @Ivan Reese. I've been missing Zulip's channel view for a couple of months now. Turns out they put it into the context menu. And you get out of it if you breathe on the thing wrong. They basically took the essence of Zulip and completely fucked it up. If I wanted per-topic views I could go use, like, phpBB. There is no way around it. People that talk together should run their own platform and potentially write their own platform. The medium is the message.

Agreed… but there's still going to be a small group of people who get to decide the way that the (primary/default/official?) client should work, and then everyone else will just need to accept it to some extent (or make their own, which is probably prohibitively difficult for many)

Totally. The key is a smaller blast radius.

I still think protocols, not apps, is the way to go. Notice how nobody complains as much about their email apps.

Just an update here. Zulip does still support what I remember being its default flow. You just have to struggle with confusing menus and settings. Ping me if you need more details.