https://blog.zulip.com/2020/07/16/zulip-3-0-released/ just leaving this here...

I saw this, and had pangs of greener grass on the other side. Still, the social factors of the switching cost would be painful, and there would be a new set of people saying "It would be easier for me if we used Slack instead of Zulip"... sigh.

Some testimonials from people who switched from Slack to Zulip on hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860338 • The topics model is fantastic, having proper markdown and LaTeX support is also killer. • Coming from Slack, it was a breath of fresh air to be able to make an issue on their GitHub issue tracker and have fast, friendly thoughtful replies and quick action. • absolutely LOVE the syntax highlighting support AND topic centered conversations! For technical conversations when you gotta share a lot of code, it makes a HUGE difference when you can share code snippets that are easy to read. • It becomes a searchable knowledgebase as a side-effect of its threading model (the exact opposite of the pile of unorganized mess that Slack usually devolves into) • it's a dream to use because it's faster than Slack (though that bar is so low you have to dig to find it) and Riot, and its keyboard navigation is second to none.

I'm a sucker for a new chat program, but I appreciate not wanting to facture the community. Slack does have a free/highly discounted plan for non-profits. I looked it up the other day when there was that conversation about exporting chat history.

Despite what I just posted, I agree about the problem with fracturing the community. Zulip has a different data model and mental model than Slack. If the goal was to cleanly migrate from Slack to an open source platform with no memory hole, then we would want to migrate all our history and set up a seamless 2-way gateway where either platform can be used for as long as the migration takes. For this kind of migration, I think that Mattermost would work better.

We can export the full history currently. See here. It's a manual process, but it's fast. It gives us a starting point. There are already a few people working on tools to make this history searchable, linkable, and remix-able. Hopefully, we'll be able to patch over some of our pain points in Slack, and perhaps this will help reduce the significance of Slack, making it easier for us to switch down the road.

Zulip claims they can reliably import a slack history export, but I'm not clear on how the mapping takes place. @Ivan Reese I know I asked before, but you didn't really answer because I think I was unclear so I want to ask again: slack gives out free credit sometimes for whatever reason, and it can accumulate over time, if you haven't you should really check if this workspace has some, because then it might be possible to migrate quite seamlessly at low cost. See the tip box in this link: https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/help/articles/202878523-Try-a-paid-plan-for-free?nojsmode=1

We have $50 in credit.

Oh that's grossly insufficient. Unfortunate.

If Zulip can import a slack history export, then someone with access to this data could set up an experimental zulip instance on zulipchat.com, import our history, and invite people to try it out. My other concern is setting up a two-way gateway so that our Slack history is kept up to date in the Zulip instance.

We use Zulip as the Slack-like for my small software studio. I find it neither strictly better nor strictly worse than Slack, only different.

My main complaint about slack is that I routinely see 1-2s lags while typing which really discourages me from writing anything. I regularly use both zulip and riot without similar problems.

On my old phone, the slack UI was so slow as to be unusable. I couldn't post anything when away from my computer, and reading posts was hit and miss. I just upgraded to a new phone a few weeks ago, and it's fine. To use slack you just need a recent CPU and lots of memory. ☹️

Funnily, it's the opposite for me—I only use slack from my phone because it's way too slow on my computer. The only time I was able to use slack from my computer was with third party clients like the weechat or emacs clients

you just need a recent CPU and lots of memory

I wasn't talking about my phone, I was talking about my laptop with a 2017 Xeon and 32gb of ram...

I wasn't a huge fan of switching to Zulip a few months ago, but it's seeming better as the community grows (and Zulip gets developed further). I'd love to be able to skim across topics and write large-ish posts, both of which Slack isn't really designed for.