Hi, Zulip developer here. At the risk of cross-posting with Where should the compiler team (and perhaps working groups) chat?, I just wanted to offer support, and answer any questions you may have about Zulip.
To answer some of the questions from this thread:
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Business model: We sell hosting on zulipchat.com, and enterprise support for on-premise deployments: https://zulipchat.com/plans/.
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Deleting of threads: Admins can delete messages and ban users, and also rename threads. Zulip threads are meant to be ephemeral, with the moderation (by design) happening on streams, messages, and users.
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Vendor lock-in: Zulip runs both in the cloud and on-premise, and we provide full exports: https://zulipchat.com/help/export-your-organization. The on-premise product is the same as the SAAS product, and there is no proprietary code (so e.g. running Zulip locally doesn’t need a a license.)
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Mobile: We’re working on it. We’ve put a lot of work on it since the beginning of the summer, and are going to continue to do so. The current version (released today) is already a lot more reliable than the version in July, and I use it pretty heavily when travelling.
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Bridging: It’s hard to satisfactorily bridge Zulip with IRC or Discord, due to the different conversation models, but we do bridge with email.
For accessibility: I suspect we’re considerably farther along than Discord is, and our goal is to make the main webapp a great experience for blind users. We’re not there yet, but I think we’ve gotten the basic framework right, and getting to good accessibility won’t involve throwing out lots of html.
Some things we have made a lot of progress on in the accessibility space are:
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Nearly everything in Zulip can be navigated via the keyboard (many of the developers of Zulip exclusively navigate Zulip from the keyboard, at this point).
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We have a terminal client (in alpha, but all of the basic functionality is there, and we’d love feedback).
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We bridge with email. It doesn’t support things like emoji reactions, but the basic “read and reply” functionality is there.
I’ll be checking this thread for a bit, but also feel free to find me on https://chat.zulip.org (Zulip community server) or at support@zulipchat.com at any time.