Discourse VS zulip-archive

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

Discourse is also open source https://github.com/discourse/discourse

I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.

Why isn't Discourse being listed here for forum software? It's open source and designed for modern communities. https://www.discourse.org/

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

I was reading mastodon.social's privacy policy, and noticed that the link at the bottom to Discourse's privacy policy links to Discourse's Github. I'm surprised because I thought it would be the privacy policy on discourse.org.

Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, and time.

You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Nice examples of what it looks like:

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://forum.level1techs.com/

As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-dis...

As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...

So, I'm asking myself if you would be interested in joining a good old-fashioned forum (probably using discourse as software) in order to communicate with other gifted people around the globe. And please add any ideas you might have for a platform like this.

You can do search engine indexing via https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive; it defaults to archiving your public access streams.

We will eventually support search engine indexing without the extra overhead of running a separate archive tool (likely as an organization-level settings checkbox, since not everyone who wants public access wants search engine indexing).

I've also mentioned this in a separate comment in the post but reposting here for visibility:

To clarify Zulip let's you export their conversations and then render it by generating a static HTMl similar to https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ You'd have to use https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive to achieve. You can see it in the Caveats sections in their documentation https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats They are working on it here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881

Zulip has both a business model and an official archiving tool.

Yes, the web-public view is being actively worked on: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=label%3A%22area%3A+w...

There’s also a separate zulip-archive project that exports Zulip streams to static HTML: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive

Search engine indexing is available in Zulip today via Zulip's public archive tool (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive). Many larger OSS projects using Zulip, like Rust, Julia, and Lean Prover, use it.

We expect to have a native feature allowing a configurable set of streams to be browsed using a real Zulip web app UI without creating an account, available in beta in the next few weeks; we're actively integrating the implementation via https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532.

We plan to look at optional search indexing in that native implementation once the logged-out access feature is complete complete.

I lead the Zulip project.

I'm not sure about this detail of Slack's ToS. At a technical level, you can certainly export your data from a Slack (which is we implement https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack); I imagine it's easy to write a tool to format and publish it.

FWIW Zulip maintains https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive, which is a configurable API-based tool for creating a static HTML archive from a Zulip organization, with tooling to update it every few minutes. A lot of larger open projects use it. (We're also working on a native logged-out access feature with less janky formatting, which has a working PR that we need to integrate).

I suppose you could export your data from Slack, import it into Zulip, and then publish that using zulip-archive if you didn't want to write any code, but I'm sure the formatting would be better preserved if one avoided the "convert Slack markup to Zulip markup" step.

It's quite sad Slack and Discord are often the first choice for open communities. They are siloed and unless you are deliberately searching in a specific workspace, you'll never run into the information in a search engine.

In comparison, Zulip:

- provides HTML export functionality https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive#zulip-html-archive (example https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive )

- URLs are nice and encode meaning (e.g. https://memex.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/279601-hpi/topic/...)