Is this GDPR compliant? Because both porting user data around to what I assume is American servers as well as maintaining the ability of users to delete personal data seems to not be possible if slack channels are being scraped by this. Honestly it also looks like this just breaks Slack's TOS.
Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since your data is append-only have you considered something like just sticking all of the data in s3? Might be awkward to deal with things like updating threads, but just editing the s3 file containing the json response for a given thread might work, and then you can skip having a database entirely.
Oh interesting. I think like you said updates might be a little bit tricky as well as search. I'm using full text search from Postgres so that would be tough on S3. I'm doing some aggressive caching with Vercel and Nextjs which essentially turns in to putting the data in S3.
You can do text search and other SQL queries in S3 data by plugging AWS Athena to it.
It isn't very scalable, though. Last time I checked it would handle few dozens of concurrent queries, at most.
But for fulltext search, what really makes sense is something like OpenSearch.
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#33I love stuff like this. With so many communities congregating on Discord, Slack etc. we lose a lot of valuable information that would previously have been on something publicly searchable like StackOverflow. A lot of OSS has fallen into this pattern and it can be truly infuriating at times.
It's a bit of a negative comment but I sure wish these communities would rediscover forums. They're not all perfect but I am convinced that Discord and Slack are where valuable information goes to get mixed with gifs and memes then die. I guess that won't happen until someone starts hosting discourse for free. Awesome that Linen is trying to build a different future though.
I agree. I really dislike Slack and Discord compared to forums. Being able to keep a topic in a confined thread and then bump it to the top when there is activity is so useful.
Slack does have threads but you never know about updates unless you're already chatting in the thread.
Slack just feels like email before threads got grouped together.
Don't get me wrong, Slack is a great chat tool for small groups and it's a bonus that others can search it. But forums are far superior for large groups and long lived conversations.
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#34I love stuff like this. With so many communities congregating on Discord, Slack etc. we lose a lot of valuable information that would previously have been on something publicly searchable like StackOverflow. A lot of OSS has fallen into this pattern and it can be truly infuriating at times.
Yes! This is the exact problem I was hoping to solve with Linen. I felt frustrated that there was so much good information being hidden in Slack and Discord communities. I also was annoyed at slack links in Github issues that leads no where because it was archived historically.
I don't know if this makes any sense but have you thought about a way to migrate from Slack to a forum?
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#35Supporting Discord would be really neat.
Is there anything similar for Discord?
Yes I am working on it actively I will have the version ready sometime this Friday. Discord has been taking longer than Slack since their API's isn't as intuitive and their threading model is a bit tricker since not everyone uses Discord threads. If you sign up on Linen.dev happy to reach out once Discord is ready to get some feedback.
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#36I love stuff like this. With so many communities congregating on Discord, Slack etc. we lose a lot of valuable information that would previously have been on something publicly searchable like StackOverflow. A lot of OSS has fallen into this pattern and it can be truly infuriating at times.
And not only is Slack harder to search, free Slack instances limit history to 10,000 messages, so older messages effectively disappear.
They also badger community members who have no say in the matter to upgrade.
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#37I love stuff like this. With so many communities congregating on Discord, Slack etc. we lose a lot of valuable information that would previously have been on something publicly searchable like StackOverflow. A lot of OSS has fallen into this pattern and it can be truly infuriating at times.
It's a bit of a negative comment but I sure wish these communities would rediscover forums. They're not all perfect but I am convinced that Discord and Slack are where valuable information goes to get mixed with gifs and memes then die. I guess that won't happen until someone starts hosting discourse for free. Awesome that Linen is trying to build a different future though.
Whoever can solve applying topic change-point detection (e.g. https://aclanthology.org/C18-1212/) to wide-ranging Discord and Slack channels, and put together a novel UI for discovering probable thread-intentions there (for both closed and open communities) would unlock an incredible repository of human knowledge. There's a massive opportunity here.
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#38This is genius.
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#39[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
#40I truly hope you succeed in getting as many communities as possible. This adds a lot of value to everyone.