Yes, I've used zulip - every single comment spawned a thread or responded to a thread. Users weren't used to responding to a thread, which meant we had threads of single comments constantly. I'm puzzled that you're puzzled. I thought this was the way Zulip worked. It was about 2 years ago, at any rate. Did it change since then? If so, that's exciting in its own right.

This is the case (and it's okay)!

Every message (other than PMs) is within a topic thread which is within a stream.

This can be structured by having ongoing social threads but users do need to know that they should respond to existing "broad topic ongoing" threads instead of creating a new micro-thread for every message.

We structure the Streams into roughly:

- company-wide announcements

- org streams

- team streams

- social

then within #social you could have ongoing topics like "books", "weekend", "music", etc...

You can also restrict stream access as needed (only team members can view the team stream).

I bet that was the problem; we created streams for channels and vs. having a single stream with all the channels being threads inside of them.

Hmm, that sounds like something was going wrong, threads don't just spawn, you have to create them, and a thread with a single comment kind of defeats the purpose.

Oh, were you editing the subject every time you commented, maybe? That's not indicated, you only edit the subject when you want to create a new thread. In our use case, threads were relatively infrequent and specific to a topic, e.g. "middle name database migration", and that's where the discussion for that happened.

Somehow we had like 15 users and not one of them managed to make a comment that wasn't a new thread - like I said though, it was like 2 years ago. Either there was a bug, or it was a design decision, or maybe even a misconfiguration on the server - regardless it got a hearty thumbs down by the community and we went on to try matrix. I was hoping for Zulip since it was a way easier install than matrix + riotweb was, especially since we wanted to self host everything. In the end all the bugs we had in riotweb and the phone apps were enough for us to jump for MM, which has its own problems but was most in line with what we wanted.

Anyway, if Zulip isn't thread-first, then I guess it's less a competitor to Teams than I thought. The only way we found to make teams work for us and our very small team is to keep everything in a named joint chat and everyone utterly ignores the channels like the plague. It's always amusing when someone posts something to a channel for the first time in weeks/months and then people start responding thinking it's chat and every. single. response. becomes a new thread, because they didn't respond inside the original thread.

That's very odd to me, I've never had that problem and don't see why it could be.

Zulip is thread-only, it's just that thread can be used as channels if you ignore the top level (streams).

You are lost in a maze of twisty threads, all alike.

Hmm. I’m not sure that’s a game I want to be forced to play.