By Daniel Krol - 29 Jan 2025
We are officially moving the chat portion of the Sandstorm Community to Zulip. Important announcements will go on our mailing lists, and you are still encouraged to continue to use them for questions if you prefer email over chat.
Zulip is an organized team chat app designed for efficient communication. It is built by a FOSS company which offers free hosting to FOSS projects such as ours. We appreciate this, and invite you to give them a look.
If you are still on Matrix, or especially if you are on IRC, we invite you to move over. Zulip will be a great way to collaborate at a faster pace than our mailing lists. You don’t need to install an app to join, though apps are available. You don’t even need to log in to see what’s happening.
The Sandstorm project started out on IRC. This was long before the community fork. It was originally on Freenode, and eventually moved over to Libera.Chat as many others did.
We eventually bridged our Libera.Chat room to Matrix, allowing IRC and Matrix users to interoperate. Then in 2023, Libera.Chat decided to shut down their Matrix IRC bridge. First temporarily, then permanently. You can see comments on this topic from Matrix and Libera.Chat.
So now we had a split chat room, IRC and Matrix. By this time, most people had switched over to the Matrix side, which we decided to make the official one. It was still labeled as a sort of Libera.Chat “bridge to nowhere”, but we didn’t want to lose more people just to change our channel name. We did our best to let the few remaining IRC users know that the community moved over, though a handful people missed the message and stuck around.
But then, some time later, we were made aware of another problem: our channel was not allowing new members to join. We reached out to Matrix when we realized this, and we have yet to hear back. Perhaps moving to a new (non-bridge) Matrix room would fix it. But frankly, just as a personal preference, we were never in love with Matrix in the first place. If we were going to move, we were open to exploring new options.
More recently, one of our community members had been exposed to Zulip in a couple other open source communities. He suggested it for Sandstorm, so we tried it out. It’s a different animal than Matrix, but we ultimately decided that it would be a good fit for our community. We decided to make the switch!
Zulip conversations are organized into Channels and Topics. A Topic corresponds roughly to a “thread” in other chat apps, except that it is mandatory. That is, every post in a Channel has to be on a certain Topic. You can view a Channel as a whole or focus on a given Topic. This takes a little getting used to, but it keeps things organized.
If discussion in a thread starts to drift into a different subject, an admin can move those posts to a new appropriate Topic. Similarly Topics can be moved to a more appropriate Channel. This keeps us focused.
Channels can be made public and searchable on the web, and we have made most of our channels public. Specific conversations are linkable (such as the link in the paragraph below). As with mailing lists, this is very useful for an open source project. For instance, a Github pull request can link to where the idea was previously hashed out on Zulip.
Not to mention, Zulip is just snappy. It’s not bulky like Slack or Matrix. We find all these features conducive to having productive conversations. This is where we can “get in the weeds” and work things out.
They’re also great to work with. They responded and resolved a bug report overnight. (Again, by contrast we reached out to Matrix for help with the bridge and we never heard back).