I respect your opinion and experience, but FWIW for the readers, I had the completely opposite experience.

The batch did divide into groups. Some people were learning functional programming, others focused on Transformers architecture, while yet others on dynamic programming. But I quickly found a small group of people who were building things that I was interested in, games and AI applications.

In the unstructured time I was able to set my own goals, ship a lot, write a lot, and give a lot of talks on topics that are very interesting to me.

I didn't expect or get any free food from the Recurse Centre -- I was in New York, I had the world's cuisines available to me. I often went on lunch along with other RC members to reasonably affordable places within walking distance.

RC is not a college course with exams and a fixed syllabus -- It was unstructured and self-directed -- and that's what made it so special.

New York is... New York. I've spent a lot of time there, and even lived there for a summer. I was at a board meeting down there recently and a new young ex officio member basically asked "How do people deal with the confusion?" It is what it is. And it used to be worse.

I'm not sure who you are, but I'm sorry that RC was a bad experience for you. I appreciate your sharing your experience so respectfully, and I hope you've since found other communities or opportunities that are better a better fit for you!

I know one or two other people who have similar feelings to you (bland experience, wish they had connected more with the people). That is why in my advice for people considering Recurse Center (https://jcmorrow.com/recurse/) I encourage people not to come in too attached to a project.

The competitors to Zulip are Slack and Discord, maybe Matrix/IRC. The question is how do you group subjects and sub-subjects aka threading and Zulip forces the user to pick both explicitly. This results in an easier to follow conversation. Eg in the 3d printing channel there's a modeling thread and a filament thread, so if you want to see stuff about filaments, you don't see the conversation about modeling unless you specifically go over to that thread. Meanwhile, Slack's threads are part of the channel, so you can go into a channel, post a message, and half the conversation is in the channel itself, and half the conversation is in a thread. So you're forced to read all of slack to keep up with the conversation. At the end of the day, it's about signal to noise, and Zulip's UX raises signal.

Everyone I’ve met personally who attended RC was insufferable. Condescending to the point they couldn’t disguise their contempt for people who they thought knew less. So extreme to the point they simply refused to learn from other people. One even literally bullied a teammate to tears.