[krapht]

Why not have a megatopic for things that don't need their own topic?

Topics are necessary when you start having a huge Zulip server, 100+ people. There's so much noise --- dividing things by channel is too coarse.

I participate in several open source Zulip servers and it reminds me of a better IRC. It's a lot more ergonomic that Gitter or Discord.

[ssivark]

Topics are otherwise incredibly useful even with a small number of people, if you want to carry out parallel & wide-ranging conversations on different timescales. Implicitly designing for a single topic per channel forces chats to be ephemeral and makes it very hard to have long timescale discussions.

Eg. If I'm discussing buying a house or a career change (personal) or a new business strategy for my company (work) I don't want all conversations dumped into a single river. Slack's model of threads within a channel feels too schizophrenic; Zulip's model of multiple conversations arranged loosely by theme (and accessible from the sidebar) is much better.

Catch-all topics are good for the ephemeral stream of chatter.

Some might say that chat should be only for ephemeral stuff, but then that is basically avoiding the essential complexity (of long term conversations) which must live somewhere to enforce some Procrustean simplicity on the chat platform.

[travisgriggs]

My frustration with the flow, is that you’re forcing me to make a decision at a point where I don’t really know if a thought/idea/comment I want to share will rise to the level of warranting the organizational overhead of making it a “topic” vs just a little toe in the main stream.

[wrs]

I haven’t used Zulip in a while, but can’t you reorganize messages/topics after posting? I remember that as being one of the biggest advantages over Slack for exactly this reason (the Slack equivalent is “I wish I’d known to reply in a thread, because oops, this topic took over the channel”).