now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip... so that we suffer connect with the rest of the org

On Zephyr, which is what Zulip was modeled after, I was in chat rooms that created a separate topic for each development issue and each customer support ticket, which made it easy for different groups of people to work on different things and still stay in the public chat room, and also extremely easy to go look up history later.

You will undoubtedly miss the strict threading because you are coming from Zulip.

on Zulip I have to navigate the cacophony of main screen, stand in the open and scream my question, hoping that people approach and form a group around me (I feel both open and alone)

I hear Zulip could actually be a real alternative, though I have no experience with it.

Zulip is an OSS slack alternative with a much better conversational model.

Zulip's topics map exactly to AI chats - you can have the whole team and the bot focused on one thing. The Zulip team has been admirably cautious with their own approach to AI in the product - which I am so thankful for!

It had the potential to exceed the market cap of their core product... had they been more successful, compared to Slack which has a 24.30B market cap.

We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved.

“Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years.

The company just wants that done rather than you spending a couple weeks installing... Zulip, figuring out how to make them high availability and backed up and everything.

Zulip has been consistently snappy even as we've onboarded users onto our instance. Also Zulip's threading model is really nice to use once you and your team gets the hang of topic separation.

In some cases there are good selfhostable options (nextcloud, mattermost zulip).

If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix.

Zulip does what I need and does it well. It scales excellently to large organizations discussing broad arrays of topics. It gets out of my way and I don't find myself thinking about it.