Hey y’all, was considering giving Zulip a try. I’ve got a group of friends that do everything from play games together, share memes, and organize medium-ish sized events that require a fair amount of coordination.
I was considering doing a self-host and was curious if doing this through a VPS service would work?
I was also maybe wanting to host somewhere I could also do a CMS and maybe a foundary instance.
As far as the CMS goes it would be a simple blog for sharing music and things.
Foundary is a VTT similar to roll20.
Thanks in advance!
Zulip pretty easy to self host. I ran a server for a group of friends a little while back, and it worked great. The UI takes a bit of getting used to, but it is great once you do because everything is a thread by default. And that makes it really easy to catch up on things.
I manage a self-hosted Zulip instance on a VPS and have been quite impressed overall. The install/updates/maintenance have all gone very smoothly with no real problems over several years across major versions.
When evaluating options, Zulip won because of its unique “topics” feature that helps organize conversations in channels so they are not so fragmented and difficult to follow/find later. It may take some users a little bit to get used to this but it’s worth it IMO. Or you can choose to not use topics and it’s still a good choice for chat with permanent searchable history.
Best to try it out and see how you like it, the install is very painless.
Thank you for your comment
Is there a particular reason for Zulip vs something like Signal or Jitsi or Matrix? (Also asking for myself because I’ve been looking into Matrix again lately and this is the second time I’ve seen Zulip come up and in relation to VTTs lol)
As far as I can tell, Signal can’t do multiple text channels in the same way discord can. Migrating a Discord ‘server’ onto a Signal chat would only work if it were a small group. Anything bigger than that would basically just give you a really big and disorganized group chat (though it would at least be a private disorganized group chat).
Been looking for ease of use and a few people just are adverse to matrix, hoping Zulip would be a hit easier for them but I don’t know yet
It’s quite good from my experience, better than Matrix for group based communication thanks to the threads structure (supported everywhere as opposed to Matrix where even Element X don’t support them officially). It’s not federated, but for your use case it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Why consider it? Just give it a try.
I don’t necessarily have any objections other than the navigation is just horrendous. You don’t have a traditional channel, every single message has to go into a thread.
There is a general topic per channel, and that’s where messages go by default on mobile
