• Helix 🧬
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    42 years ago

    Chat apps as information repositories, really? […] use emails

    How are emails better than chats in that regard?

    • @bc3114@lemmy.ml
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      -22 years ago

      Because emails can be threaded? So it can be used as some kind of ticketing system. Newcomers can easily catch up too.

      • Helix 🧬
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        42 years ago

        Zulip has threading, which you can even rename after you already set a topic. I don’t know an email client where you can easily rename mail threads.

        If you imagine a ticketing system based on mail conversations, it’s not far from Zulip. You should try it.

        • Arthur BesseOP
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          22 years ago

          Zulip has threading, which you can even rename after you already set a topic. I don’t know an email client where you can easily rename mail threads.

          Not only can you edit the topic of your own messages, but (if the right organization setting is enabled) you can actually change the topic of other people’s messages which is really awesome for moving offtopic digressions out of a conversation. all of the messages remain visible in their original temporal order in the full stream view, but when you “narrow” to a specific topic the offtopic messages disappear.

          • Helix 🧬
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            22 years ago

            Yeah, that’s vastly superior to everything I’ve seen with emails. I wish mails worked like Zulip.

      • Arthur BesseOP
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        32 years ago

        within a “stream” (the word zulip uses for channels/rooms/groups/etc), they have a concept of topics… which are sort of like linear email threads (without nested replies).

        a proper ticketing system is nice to have, but, if you have any kind of chat then some information will inevitably end up there and only there. so the question is not if chat is a knowledge repository but rather how long it takes to find things there (and then to find related things after you find one thing). zulip’s fast search and topics make this very easy.

      • @onlooker@lemmy.ml
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        22 years ago

        Threaded conversations is what I was getting at, yes. Also, I’m not sure about Zulip, but emails can also be backed up and archived.

        • Arthur BesseOP
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          2 years ago

          see my reply above. zulip is less of a slack clone than mattermost or rocketchat are; it has “topics” within “streams” which are a kind of threading.

          besides database backups it can also export everything to static html for archival.