Comment by Charmunk
8 months ago
Discord was not in consideration due to all the paywalled features and the lack of control, as well as locking bots behind admins (as hackclub is a community of programmers, we encourage all users to make their own bots to improve the community)
We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
> We discussed zulip a bit before deciding on mattermost, but the very subpar mobile app of zulip caused us to not go with it
This keeps being repeated, but didn't Zulip just roll out[0] a brand new mobile app? Are you sure that was the app that was evaluated? What specifically was "subpar" about it when you tried it?
Given the extreme limitations that Mattermost is trying to impose on the free self-hosted solution (250 users maximum!), Zulip seems like it needs to be considered again.
I have not really had a chance to use either Mattermost or Zulip, I'm just pointing out what I see as an obvious mismatch between Hack Club's needs and what Mattermost provides.
[0]: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...
[1]: "User limit reduced to 250 (from 1,000)." https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
We just evaluated zulip as well and the mobile app was extremely bare bones. Also, I liked the UX of the web but others felt it was way too technical to give to our staff (some of whom will really struggle with any kind of change).
I haven’t really decided yet though. Has anybody had a success with Zulip with nontechnical? I’m looking at mattermost now but it just seems to be a different point on the enshittification arc.
Zulip's product lead here. We hear from a variety of folks that they've had a good experience with onboarding to Zulip, https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/ being a good example. That said, the mental model for using Zulip is a bit different from other chat apps, and I think it helps a lot to approach onboarding with intention.
Making the experience of getting started with Zulip more smooth has been an ongoing priority for the past couple of years, and we've got more in the works. If there are particular aspects of the app that felt too technical, I'd love to get the feedback.
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Regarding the latter sentence, that's if you treat it like a service. If you want active support as well as developers to work on it constantly, someone has to pay them. If, however, you've evaluated the product and are happy with it as-is, and consider that you're literally a community of coders if you were to want some tweaks, then there cannot be an enshittification arc because you can use the current version indefinitely under the current terms
I find it strange that people treat open source software like a free service. It's a free product, usually stating explicitly that "there is no warranty express or implied" in full caps. Any future improvements they release for free are worth celebrating, but not an entitlement they might price you out of by becoming "shit" all of a sudden
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