spreed VS Zulip

> 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.

To add to this, it's reasonably easy to run, and has many different plugins, from a calendar and contacts list, to an online document editor (like Google Docs, except it can be pretty slow and/or resource intensive: https://nextcloud.com/office/), to a simple clone of Slack (https://nextcloud.com/talk/), a mail client (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/mail) and other things.

That said, I've had updates (across major versions) break things on multiple occasions, one out of two servers running the exact same version has random crashes and in addition to that the file locking by default (if enabled, but not using Redis: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...) has broken and prevents me from deleting a file that just sits there and takes up a few GB of space. Oh and their Android app fails to upload files if I use the share option, instead of the file picker from within the app.

On the other hand, sure beats storing data on third party clouds and is free, so I'll still keep using it.

> The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.

Another noteworthy one is Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

It's not quite as good as something like a self-hosted instance of Mattermost or even Rocket.Chat, but honestly if you already have Nextcloud, then it's pretty cool to be able to get something decent like that up and running quickly.

Ofc that's making Nextcloud a single point of failure in some ways and occasionally things can go sideways with these plugin based platforms (historically applies more to installs of Jenkins, but also have had some performance issues with Nextcloud that had lots of apps, too).

I still rather like Nextcloud because of being able to just run it on my servers and replace a bunch of other third party cloud platforms and still somehow manage to have good enough uptime and security.

Internal chat/communication

Nextcloud Talk (version 15.0.3): Have private video calls and chat using your own server.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud has a chat app https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Nextcloud with the Talk extension can do exactly what you are looking for! https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Zulip — Real-time chat with a unique email-like threading model. The free plan includes 10,000 messages of search history and File storage up to 5 GB. also, it provides a self-hostable open-source version.

(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years). I started using it in 2016, and used for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html

A few more truly in the vibe of open source projects not advertising their hosting providers: https://plane.so/ , https://element.io/ , https://www.loomio.com/ , https://zulip.com/ , and it keeps going... Very few open source projects, in the FOSS sense, are advertising their hosting provider.

I was so excited to see this happen!

I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.

I've got two things to say;

1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for custoner's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub too just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.

2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com

I hope your business keeps prospering!

Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at [email protected].

Anyways, I'm an internet stranger, not a social media expert. So let me know what you all think. And if we make a discord or zulip or something to make this a reality, let me know and I'd love to help any way I can.