Why topics?
The same busy afternoon, in Slack and in Zulip. Do four small tasks in each and see what changes.
The same busy afternoon, in Slack and in Zulip. Do four small tasks in each and see what changes.
Topic-based threading is easier to see than to explain — especially for organizations with a lot of people. So instead of telling you, here is one busy afternoon in #engineering: thirty messages, five conversations, shown in a replica of Slack and a replica of Zulip. Nothing is rewritten between the two — only organized differently.
Pick a problem you recognize, try it in both, and see what changes.
| Problem | Slack | Zulip | What happened |
|---|
None of these tasks is unusual. They are what a normal day in a busy channel is made of — and in a feed, every one of them gets harder as the team grows. So teams split into more and more channels, and then forget to check them.
With a topic on every conversation, none of that happens. You read one conversation at a time, skip the ones that don't concern you, mute the ones that never will, and pick up a thread days later without losing the context. A busy channel stops being a problem.
That's the core problem Zulip is built around: every conversation in every channel has a topic, and everything else — the inbox, resolving, following, moving messages between conversations — builds on that.