Show HN: Linen – Open-source Slack for communities
github.com
I initially launched Linen as a tool to sync Slack and Discord conversations to a search engine-friendly website. As I talked to more community managers, I quickly realized that Slack and Discord communities don't scale well and that there needs to be a better tool, especially for open-source knowledge-based communities. Traditionally these communities have lived on forums that solved many of these problems. However, from talking to communities, I found most of them preferred chat because it feels more friendly and modern. We want to bring back a bunch of the advantages of forums while maintaining the look and feel of a chat-based community.
Slack and Discord are closed apps that are not indexable by the internet, so a lot of content gets lost. Traditional chat apps are not search engine friendly because most search engines have difficulty crawling JS-heavy sites. We built Linen to be search engine friendly, and our communities have over 30,000 pages/threads indexed by google. Our communities that have synced their Slack and Discord conversations under their domain have additional 40,000 pages indexed. We accomplish this by conditionally server rendering pages based on whether or not the browser client is a crawler bot. This way, we can bring dynamic features and a real-time feel to Linen and support search engines.
Most communities become a support channel, and managing this many conversations is not what these tools are designed for. I've seen community admins hack together their own syncs and internal devices to work to stay on top of the conversations. This is why we created a feed view, a single view for all the threads in all the channels you care about. We added an open and closed state to every thread so you can track them similarly to GitHub issues or a ticketing system. This way, you and your team won't miss messages and let them drop. We also allow you to filter conversations you are @mentioned as a way of assigning tickets. I think this is a good starting point, but there is a lot more we can improve on.
How chat is designed today is inherently interrupt-driven and disrupts your team's flow state. Most of the time, when I am @mentioning a team member, I actually don't need them to respond immediately. But I do want to make sure that they do eventually see it. This is why we want to redesign how the notification system works. We are repurposing @mentions to show up in your feed and your conversation sections and adding a !mention. A @mention will appear in your feed but doesn't send any push notifications, whereas a !mention will send a notification for when things need a real-time synchronous conversation. This lets you separate casual conversations from urgent conversations. When everything is urgent, nothing is. (credit: Incredibles) This, along with the feed, you can get a very forum-like experience to browse the conversations.
Linen is free with unlimited history for public communities under https://linen.dev/community domain. We monetize by offering a paid version based on communities that want to host Linen under their subdomain and get the SEO benefits without managing their own self-hosted instance.
We are a small team of 3, and this is the first iteration, so we apologize for any missing features or bugs. There are many things we want to improve in terms of UX. In the near term, we want to improve search and add more deep integrations, DMs, and private channels. We would appreciate any feedback, and if you are curious about what the experience looks like, you can join us here at Linen.dev/s/linen