If you have a bit of time, I'd love it if you stopped by chat.zulip.org to discuss this more interactively.
I don't think we have heard any of them from other users, so feedback including a specific example of an organization or user who struggled with this would be helpful for us to debug your experience with this feature. For the thread, my understanding of the situation is:
- The one-time setup steps for a self-hosted installation to enable web-public streams are a couple minutes of work, and to me seem immaterial compared to the minimum realistic effort for getting a server, getting a domain, transactional email provider, and SSL certificate, and then actually installing and configuring the server in the first place.
- The default stream type when creating a new stream is web-public if the feature is enabled for an organization, for users with permission to create them.
We don't allow normal users to create web-public channels as an anti-abuse measure. Trust me, you don't want it to possible for a threat actor to be able to sign up for an account in your open community, create a secret web-public channel with just themselves as a subscriber, and start hosting malware on your domain.
I hate when anti-abuse concerns limit our ability to design features in the most convenient way possible, but that's life building products for the Internet.
If anyone has ideas for how we can make this better, we'd love to discuss!
I don't think we have heard any of them from other users, so feedback including a specific example of an organization or user who struggled with this would be helpful for us to debug your experience with this feature. For the thread, my understanding of the situation is:
- The one-time setup steps for a self-hosted installation to enable web-public streams are a couple minutes of work, and to me seem immaterial compared to the minimum realistic effort for getting a server, getting a domain, transactional email provider, and SSL certificate, and then actually installing and configuring the server in the first place.
- The default stream type when creating a new stream is web-public if the feature is enabled for an organization, for users with permission to create them.
We don't allow normal users to create web-public channels as an anti-abuse measure. Trust me, you don't want it to possible for a threat actor to be able to sign up for an account in your open community, create a secret web-public channel with just themselves as a subscriber, and start hosting malware on your domain.
I hate when anti-abuse concerns limit our ability to design features in the most convenient way possible, but that's life building products for the Internet.
If anyone has ideas for how we can make this better, we'd love to discuss!