The thing is that I feel about the same with this forum.
There is s lot of elaborated content but also a large part of comments and informal chat. I guess that I miss the point anyway.
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Yeah, I supposse they are indeed easily comparable. But because they are not opposed or serve the same purpose is not easy to say that one has advantages over the other if you don’t first define the use case.
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If you want to have a real-time conversation about many topics where you can ask quick, often not very well defined questions with similiarly fuzzy answers, a chat option sounds ideal.
- Among the chat options we have, there is discourse, slack, matrix, zulip and others. Zulip has the advantage over slack and discord that is open source and it can be self-hosted, whereas Slack cannot. This implies that messages that are around 10 days old disappear and cannot be recovered in Slack, whereas if you host your Zulip (or use the benefits they have for open source communities), you can save them as long as you wish.
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If you have a very well written question that is suitable for a long, slow-paced discussion, it sounds better to ask in the forum, and Discourse is the main one in the Julia community.
The boundary between what kind of messages belong to a chat or a forum is not super well defined, as was shown when we tried bridigng the Slack and the Discourse to get around the limited time of existence of the messages in Slack. That is why many of the users use both the forum and at least one of the chat options,
Yes, as mentioned before, the boundary is not clear-cut. If you don’t feel compelled to try the chat app, then just using the discourse is the best solution for you. I think Mason’s invitation does not have the goal of making you chose one over the other.
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Just a note here, we’re not currently self hosting our Zulip instance, it’s hosted by the Zulip devs cloud service which does normally have a message expiry period, but they have a special clause for open source and educational communities where they are committed to providing them with the ‘standard paid plan’ features for free.
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That’s really great to hear! IMHO the combination of the unusual interface / model and a slightly clunky/non-intuitive UI have been probably among the main barriers to adoption. I know I’ve tried more than once to use Zulip instances, and never really stuck around since the interface never “clicked” for me (and I had other, easier options available).
I’m really rooting for them to find a nice, intuitive interface, based on the principles of what I recently heard (I forgot where) called as “progressive disclosure of complexity” — I believe that may result in a real inflection point in their adoption curve!
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How one experiences a UI is subjective, but I want to offer a counterpoint. I think Slack’s interface is worse than unintuitive: it is an aggravating, clunky mess. Just two examples: I have missed messages posted in threads that don’t appear under “All unreads”, and I hate how
`__init()__`
is rendered as a cursive _init()_ (I teach Python).
Compared to Slack, I consider Zulip to be very sensible and easy to use, especially after I learned three keyboard shortcuts: ESC to go back to the default view (recent unread topics for me), n to jump to next unread topic, and j to scroll down a topic.
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Thank you for these explanations.
I have almost no experience with chat tools.
I went to Slack once to copy my answer to a question that had been posted in Discourse: just long enough to feel a bit confused with the new interface and to realize that this question had already been answered directly on Slack.
I have the (obviously mistaken) feeling that Discourse allows for real-time conversation (e.g. via the “@xxx replies” notification) and so I was sincerely wondering what functionality Discourse was missing compared to Slack or Zulip.
Maybe it’s not about features but rather different conventions: This place is for informal discussion and This place is for a more structured exchange… ?
In this case, I confess that I regularly chat on Discourse 
As you wrote, I can stay on Discourse and ignore Slack and Zulip, but I wonder how many interesting topics and authors I’m missing by doing so.
In other words, is it relevant to consider a potential community fragmentation problem?
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Works for the Debian app too!
We’ve just joined the beta for web-public streams, so select channels in Zulip are now publicly accessible on Zulip itself without the need for an account: Open https://julialang.zulipchat.com/ and click the “Access without account” button on the right. One can also access linked threads directly without the need for an account.
This is an addition to the existing Zulip Archive.
Both still have SEO issues and aren’t listed properly in search results, but if you have a question and can’t find answers on Discourse or SO, the web-public stream is searchable and might be worth a look 
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