Correction: Zulip is not centralized [LWN.net]

Correction: Zulip is not centralized

Posted Feb 22, 2026 17:16 UTC (Sun) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Correction: Zulip is not centralized by tabbott
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

I think the right way to phrase it is that Zulip is not centralized but that a Zulip server is centralized. Any particular conversation happens in a single place, with exclusively participants known to that place; conversations that happen in a different place have participants whose identities are not connected to the identities in the first place, even if the same client has both of them. On the other hand, the same server and client software and protocol can be replicated many times; while Facebook and Discord are different software with a single instance of each, different Zulip installations work the same way and run on the same software.

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Correction: Zulip is not centralized

Posted Feb 22, 2026 18:10 UTC (Sun) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

I think "decentralized but not federated" captures that nicely.

I'd say that's probably the biggest difference people would end up dealing with, if they switch from Discord to Zulip: you have one account per server, and DMs are per-server.

Correction: Zulip is not centralized

Posted Feb 23, 2026 2:04 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think of "decentralized but not federated" as like classic IRC, where there were multiple disconnected networks (so, not federated), but each network also had no single server necessary for having a conversation on that network (users would pick somewhat randomly between servers that weren't too far from them).

None of these options are going to be centralized in the sense of having only one instance, since anyone can get the server software to run their own instance.