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About streams and topics
In Zulip, conversations are organized by conversation streams and topics.
About streams
On Zulip, users communicate with each other in group chats by sending messages to streams, which are similar to conversation threads.
Streams are either:
- Public - Public streams are for open discussions. All users can subscribe to public streams and discuss topics there. Any Zulip user can join any public stream in the realm, and they can view the complete message history of any public stream without joining the stream.
- Private - Private streams are for confidential discussions and are only visible to users who've been invited to subscribe to them. Users who are not members of a private stream cannot subscribe to the stream, and they also cannot read or send messages to the stream.
Users are subscribed to specific streams in the realm by default, such as the #announce stream. Users can easily view messages from a specific stream; in addition, they can browse their stream subscriptions using the Zulip stream browser.
If they wish to read messages from a stream that they're not subscribed to, users can choose to join a stream. Similarly, if they are not interested in the topics being discussed in a stream, users can choose to unsubscribe from a stream.
Users can also customize their stream settings; they can pin or star important streams, change the colors of streams, and enable desktop notifications or muting for streams in order to create a better Zulip environment.
If enabled by the realm administrators, users can create streams and invite other users to a stream.
Only realm administrators can make edits to a stream, such as renaming, deleting, changing the description of a stream, removing users from a stream, or changing the accessibility of a stream.
About topics
In each stream, messages are sorted by topics. Topics are specific, fine-grained subjects that fit with the overall subject of the stream that they're sent to. Topics ensure sequential messages about the same thing are threaded together, allowing for better consumption by users.
The best stream topics are short and specific. For example, for a bug tracker integration, a good topic would be the bug number; for an integration like Nagios, the service would serve as a good topic.
Users can easily change the topics of the messages that they sent if they sent the message to the wrong topic or if some messages in a topic have gone off-topic.