supaiku dot com

how i self hosted zulip and escaped the permanent underclass

when stomped on by technocrats, don’t complain about the taste of the boot

some compelling reasons to get off of discord

before we continue, let’s first discuss the colorful set of reasons why discord is a careless, misaligned and untruthworthy company that you should not rely on. a tally of some shenanigans they’ve been up to:

escaping the permanent underclass

1. self hosting is neither scary nor expensive

to host something like zulip, you fundamentally need two things:

  • a potato (basically any computer that has a heartbeat).
  • a static ip address to host off of.

my solution to both of these is to just use hetzner1. the 5 dollar a month node with 2 vCPUs and some integer gigabytes of ram is more than enough to host a zulip instance for up to 100 people.

basically just sign up, put in some credit card 2, pick the node you want, and you’ll get some ssh credentials and an ip address. couldn’t possibly be more straightforward even if you tried.

2. asking claude3 to set up the zulip server for you

step 1: ssh into the server

step 2: point claude at the zulip self hosting docs

step 3: do whatever claude says4

step 3.5: this is optional, but you can also use an email hosting service like mailgun to handle signups emails.

step 4: there is no step 4. you now have a self hosted zulip server, congrats!

3. get a domain (if you care)

after you’re done with step 2, you technically do have a zulip instance up and running, but it’ll be accessed via something like http://100.101.81.30:8080/, and i don’t know about you, but i don’t want to click on a chat service that looks like that.

the solution: go on namecheap, or godaddy, or whatever, and buy a domain for like 7 bucks (a year). just buy a simple dot com or dot org. checkout, boom, done.

then, tab back to the claude session, and type in the magic words:

hey uh i just bought the domain from namecheap, how do i link it to my zulip
session. thanks i love you

and claude will guide your hand through the rest.

why should you go through the effort of any of this?

i’ve already listed out my case for why you should stop using discord, but why should you use zulip in particular? instead of irc, or matrix, or slack, or going outside and meeting with friends in person?

well a couple of reasons:

  1. you own literally all of the data: everything is hosted off of a postgres instance that you can cache, read, backup, ... to your hearts content. there’s also less concern of a custodial service (like discord), snooping into your server to train some AI models or whatever.

  2. among all of the chat software alternatives, zulip is the closest to getting to feature parity with discord, while avoiding the issues that got you into the discord problems in the first place (not owning the platform). irc doesn’t have image embeds, matrix doesn’t have a streamlined phone client, slack is just not open source (and also they can see your messages if they want), etc etc. i’ve tried the rest, and found zulip to be the most functional choice out of everything.

  3. the zulip search bar is blazing fast (probably because your server isn’t being multi-tenanted with 2000 other servers).

  4. everything being organized into hierarchical threads, makes links and citations extremely easy. here’s the actual link to one of my math reading threads on my server: https://chat.syndecate.org/#narrow/channel/6-math/topic/spike-reading-the-blind-spot

  5. there are vim bindings

  6. it’s remarkably fast. it’s faster than basically anything that isn’t plain irc from my experience. if you’re migrating from discord, welcome to the world of functional software.

the costs

we obviously can’t have good things for nothing, so what’s the catch?

well, here’s the tally of costs for my setup process:

  • the hetzner node itself: fixed 5.50 dollars a month
  • the domain: ~1.3 dollars a month
  • time: 2 hours (lazily copying things back and forth with claude)

and there are genuinely some features missing from discord that you’ll need to provide yourself:

  • voice / video / streaming: the big missing feature from discord. however, i don’t really miss this, since discord’s voice and video has always been completely kneecapped for everyone who wasn’t shelling out money for discord nitro. i just use google meets instead. the migration was recent, and my server is exploring alternatives, i’ll give an update when a suitable option is found.

  • backups: probably the biggest one. you’re responsible for the node. if it dies or gets corrupted, the server is gone. if you don’t like sysadminning (or paying claude to do it and all the risks that come with that), then this is likely not the option for you.

online communication is an immense part of my social life, and relying on discord for all of this was a massive liability.

compared to the rest of the services that i pay for, like spotify, netflix, or god forbid a latte at a mid coffee shop, buying back complete control and reliability over my communication channels for just 7 bucks a month is a complete steal.

alternatively, you can also just use a free tier from zulip themselves5, but then you’re back in the original position of being reliant on a service provider to keep the lights running, which for me, is a tradeoff i never want to make ever again in software.

appendix

Footnotes

  1. i’m not sponsored by any of the services mentioned btw. i just like using them. ↩

  2. btw for cloud businesses. always use a virtual card with a spend cap so you don’t have bills blowing up your account. ↩

  3. or any llm of your choosing ↩

  4. please be somewhat careful when setting up the auth and handling ssh permissions into the server. if you don’t know how to handle this, you should pay zulip to deal with it instead; they’re a good company. ↩

  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_are_the_product ↩