Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative • Hacker News Board

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#41

Post by sandGorgon » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:53 PM UTC

this is very cool! what things of slack does it NOT have - genuine question here. Like private channels, etc etc ?

can it replace slack basically ? what will i have to do ?

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#42

Post by chatmasta » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:54 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #36

How's the search? Our company moved to self hosted Rocket Chat from Slack a while ago, and while it's acceptable in general, the search is literally the worst search I've ever used in anything ever. Can't even find an exact match in the currently opened thread.

We're happy with Mattermost, and search is quite good.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#43

Post by pcthrowaway » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:54 PM UTC

mdaniel wrote: post #5

the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33248488 and there was another thread last year for their main domain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908 I wish all the locked away Slack communities would use Linen[1] because there are so many nuggets of bug-fixery buried in Slack that will age off or never be found in the horrors of Slack search 1: I really wish they'd just stop using Slack entirely sinc…

> here are so many nuggets of bug-fixery buried in Slack that will age off or never be found in the horrors of Slack search

Do people consider Slack search subpar?

I haven't used a chat app with a better one. Discord is abysmal by comparison

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#44

Post by dexterdog » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #36

How's the search? Our company moved to self hosted Rocket Chat from Slack a while ago, and while it's acceptable in general, the search is literally the worst search I've ever used in anything ever. Can't even find an exact match in the currently opened thread.

Even worse than slack's search?

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#45

Post by rahimnathwani » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

It might be worth testing different variants of the landing page copy. The version I see is this:

  Google-Searchable and community focused

Slack alternative Sync your Slack and Discord conversations to Linen and get SEO benefits while reducing customer support load

The latter sounds like I need to be a Slack or Discord user, and Linen makes the conversations searchable on the web. But the title (Slack alternative) makes it sound like I can use Linen instead of Slack.

Which is it?

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#46

Post by mdaniel » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #26

tomrod wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more about Zulip?

It's everything you want in a threaded chat server except federation. Web client is responsive and has good shortcuts. Easy-ish to self-host, cheap to buy hosted. Configurable privacy. Integration with all sorts of stuff, including email. A little lacking in community moderation tools. Text-mode client works acceptably well over a low-ish bandwidth connection. IOS and Android clients. Open source.

> Easy-ish to self-host, cheap to buy hosted.

And, perhaps most relevant to my complaint, they offer hosting for open source projects (unlike Mattermost which is ... like, "send us email and we'll think about it" or something). I would guess Mattermost would feel the most comfortabe to Slack users, since I admit that Zulip has a different mental model than Slack, but I believe it is much better for ongoing thread management once one gets used to it (IOW, had they won the fight, it would be Slack that would be the "eww, what is going on with this threading model?!")

---

https://github.com/zulip/zulip#readme (Apache 2!) just as a contrast to the sibling's LMGTFY comment :-(

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#47

Post by nottorp » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #28

einpoklum wrote: post #25

500 KB + Tens of millions of lines of code of a browser + a bunch of backend code. Want a lean Slack alternative? Use IRC. Want a fancy Slack alternative? Use Matrix.

I don't want to host a server and I want my messages to be synced between multiple devices including mobile ones. I want rich messages, images, links. I want threads.

> I want threads.

Anyone has usable threads yet? For the life of me I can't follow Slack threads.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#48

Post by cahoot_bird » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

It always seemed to me the basics of a messenger app would be the easy part to be accomplished. It's the marketing that would be hard seeing as there are already existing solutions such as Slack and Discord.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#49

Post by cassianoleal » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 8:59 PM UTC

freeqaz wrote: post #12

exabrial wrote: post #9

Can we run this locally and _not_ on the cloud?

I'm pretty sure it's Open Source here: https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev

Yeah but there are no instructions on how to deploy and operate. No user docs whatsoever that I could find, either on their website or on Github.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#50

Post by ghostpepper » Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 9:00 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #26

tomrod wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more about Zulip?

It's everything you want in a threaded chat server except federation. Web client is responsive and has good shortcuts. Easy-ish to self-host, cheap to buy hosted. Configurable privacy. Integration with all sorts of stuff, including email. A little lacking in community moderation tools. Text-mode client works acceptably well over a low-ish bandwidth connection. IOS and Android clients. Open source.

The functionality is amazing but the UX/UI is not polished to the level of a commercial product like Slack or Discord (or Twitter, which it is arguably more comparable to)