@jebba never works. I was praising #element client, but learned that its wasn't just me for who it glitches/fails to deliver messages.

@jonn

I've never seen Element not deliver messages, but I agree it isn't stable for sure.

I tried a few versions of it, and I found what worked best was adding their Element Debian repo, and installing their binary of the package via apt.

I'm generally loathe to use other upstream repos, but I create a seperate virtual machine (KVM) for Element, so it is all contained.

@jebba
@jonn
Discord went to shit like six months too soon. Element was and isn't 100% ready. I have faith in the team and development process because what is here is pretty dang cool.
I was able to install a server, set to private register and work out the cli to do admin things in under an hour, and my fam didn't have any issue onboarding.

I don't miss messages but I have had delays with the mobile app, and when many elements are active, the occasional message goes to 1-2 devices rarely.

@jebba
@jonn

The big inconvenient truth about these solutions isn't how well they can work, scale or ease of use, but it really is how well they can work on low resources or systems under load, and how easy they are to diagnose issues when they occur and maintain.

@jonn @jebba Have you considered switching homeservers?

@austin @jonn

I thought of running my own, but right now just using matrix.org. Works well enough.

@boris #zulip!!! Zulip is perfect for coops and building in public.

@jonn I can see using it for internal operations, not sure if I can get all members onboarded and comfortable.

I’m aiming for “mass market comfort with tech” but may in fact need to adjust to “some early adopter comfort”

I appreciate the +1 on it. It’s the kind of enthusiasm I’m looking for!

@boris my company uses it, @jcb's uses it and #lean programming language too. So count as +3. If you want to learn more about my experience with #Zulip, feel free to book a 15' call.

https://savvycal.com/manpages/15

@jonn thanks! Appreciate the offer, might take you up on it and/or tag you when I do a write up of what we need to get to.

I’m going to kick the tires with the volunteer team for starters.

@jonn @boris I strongly recommend Zulip. It takes a little getting used to at first, but the stream and topic-based threading scales incredibly well and I can’t imagine running a distributed team without it

@jcb @jonn thank you for the feedback!

Are there any “here’s how we setup #Zulip to run our team” write ups you two have seen?

@boris @jcb the biggest revelation I had was from a friend of mine, Vlad Shcherbina who said "treat #Zulip as a realtime #bbs system like #phpbb".

If you get that, the management becomes organic.

@boris @jcb additionally, I feel like the following are the highest impact suggestions I can make:

1. Allow as many people as possible to move messages from topic to topic.
2. Encourage moving conversations that went on a tangent to their own topic (you normally know it went on a tangent whem you see it).
3. Make special slow "announcement" topics, encourage posting only really important information there.

@jonn @jcb thanks! So you treat it as persistent? Do you have another long form writing space that is not GitHub for docs / knowledge base / handbooks / etc?

Do you selfhost?

@boris @jcb we're in the process of migrating from Announce / Knowledge base topics in Zulip to #Notion.

Both my company and @jcb 's self-host because it's better / cheaper than buying hosted instances. The only trick is to scale the instance as the community grows s.t. there are no random restarts of zulip's systemd service.

@jonn @jcb awesome, approach the info.

We have a customized Discourse instance that works for us that we self host, that has Public & Permissioned areas.