Zulip

Join ZULIP at https://noisebridge.zulipchat.com.

Status

As of 2026-07-01, Zulip is still in a trial use period for Noisebridge coordination. In practice, the #rack guild and #meetup-infra group use it for some discussion. It's also the best channel to reach the 2026 treasurer in a public forum, in #finance-wg

As of 2025-12-09, Noisebridge's non-profit cloud use was approved.

FAQ

How do I find [topic]?

Search for it! :D As is best practice in discord, as well.

How do I use Zulip? What does typical interaction look like?

When you open the chat client, new messages on topics are shown in the top-left sidebar lists of

• Inbox (list of topic threads with new activity, grouped by channel, with new message counts at thread & channel level),
• Recent conversations (table view of channel > conversation (/topic thread), participants, and last-active date—with more filtering & search available), and
• Combined feed (all the threads with new messages, laid out back-to-back).

The sidebar also contains Mentions, Reactions, Starred messages, & Drafts. There are DMs, Pinned channels, and then default channel lists. Zulip uses an account model similar to Slack's—every organization owns their own chat server domain, and accounts are separate, individually registered on each domain.

Who else uses it?

A wide range of free culture & free knowledge communities use Zulip.

Public community users of Zulip include ADSB.lol, Fediverse, LEAN, LibreCAD, Rust groups, Recurse Center, and Wikimedia, from the communities page. Many servers have channels that can be viewed anonymously from the web, without logging in.

The central developers use https://chat.zulip.org/ and most development & handling of issues happens in public view.

Can we change how it works in X or Y way? Add a channel?

Chat services in use at Noisebridge are always ready to host new conversations. Wide interest in a topic, and need for a place to discuss it, are best determined by the volume of engagement & diversity of participation present in existing channels, or reasonably expected.

There are repeated cycles of proposals to prune down the discord channels available, and sometimes at the same time, to make new channels for [hot new topic]. The discord forum style channels—mostly named *-forum—serve to release some of the pressure for new channels, reserving it for topics that out grow a forum / "QA thread" discussion, or a few. Zulip is essentially all forum-style, encouraging topic-specific thread creation (and allows some moving of messages or threads to support that structure).

The naive rule to predict how long a topic will survive: is how long has it survived already, the Lindy effect or Lindy's law, the idea that: the future life expectancy of some non-perishable thing, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to its current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy.

Why Zulip?

Why do some Noisebridgers like Zulip? What does it offer?

Zulip is free software (as in speech & as in beer), gh:zulip/zulip. It could be called a chat-forum.

As a baseline, in appearance & account-organization scoping & control, it looks largely like Slack: web, desktop, mobile apps & per-organization server host names where an account must be registered with each organization, each domain, to use. Zulip does support filterable public Guest viewing without login.

It derives a lineage, not from IRC, but from Zephyr, at MIT, which is something like email (SMTP) or NNTP (network news transfer protocol), used in many configurations and roles from DMs to groups to annoucement threads and multi-threaded conversation.

Zulip inherits the widely acceptable versions of this, supporting channels (formerly 'streams') with new topic threads spun up on demand (and optionally disabled, a general chat topic).