Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

linen.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 219 posts

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#71

Post by kodah »

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…

I personally don't think Slack is a great product for open communities. While I don't think they're actively hostile to open communities it's certainly not their priority from a feature perspective. In my view, Slack is an enterprise product, and Discord is more of a commercial product. It's very difficult to be both and gain necessary market share.

There's also the tangential fact that open source shouldn't be relying on proprietary communication protocols that are difficult to migrate away from or make it difficult to maintain anonymity.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#72

Post by palijer »

While the optimization is cool and an interesting read - it's interesting to call this a "Slack alternative" when there are only a couple similarities between the products in that they have people sending text messages to channels.

This is more of an IRC/forum alternative to me (which Slack originally was) until it is possible to use Linen instead of Slack.

Or just as a Slack plugin for the public Google search aspect - but this is absolutely incorrect to call it a Slack alternative for anyone who is using Slack as Slack. Things video/screen sharing/drawing huddles, integrations, SSO and permissions, slackbot, OCR search, notification settings etc aren't just a different of features - it makes it a different platform and tool entirely and solve different problems.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#73

Post by tomrod »

ctvo wrote: post #22
tomrod wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more about Zulip?

https://www.google.com/search?q=Zulip

Hey, glad you found information that works for you!

In my experience, Google search results are poor these days, prioritizing esoterica or blogspam instead of useful insights due to decades of SEO battles. I prefer to hear what folks I'm directly interacting with are saying when they make a recommendation instead of jumping to the old "LMGTFY" silliness we all smugly passed to others circa 2008 who forgot to RTFM/RTA.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#74

Post by RicoElectrico »

palijer wrote: post #72

While the optimization is cool and an interesting read - it's interesting to call this a "Slack alternative" when there are only a couple similarities between the products in that they have people sending text messages to channels. This is more of an IRC/forum alternative to me (which Slack originally was) until it is possible to use Linen instead of Slack. Or just as a Slack plugin for the public Google search aspec…

Honestly "alternative" should be a taboo word for most OSS projects, as it is overselling stuff. Manage expectations.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#76

Post by stavros »

ghostpepper wrote: post #50
dsr_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I disagree, the UX definitely is very polished, and much better than Slack. The UI, yes, I agree, though I find it very clean and functional.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#77

Post by connordoner »

KMnO4 wrote: post #13
Manjuuu wrote: post #2

The size is only one of the factors, it can be small but slow, especially when the history grows.

I agree. while(1) malloc(1000); Is only 0.02kb and will bring your computer to a crawl.

This made me giggle more than it should have.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#79

Post by stavros »

tomrod wrote: post #17
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…

Tell me more about Zulip?

Unfortunately for Zulip, it's one of those things that you have to experience to understand how great it is. I can tell you all about its speed, its great UX, about how easy the threading model makes discourse, about how it's open source, about how it's a joy to navigate, etc.

Nothing sounds like that big a deal unless you seriously try it in a company setting. I tried it once and there's no going back, I miss it every time I have to use Slack or Discord.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#80

Post by capableweb »

Eduard wrote: post #57

Ah yes, highlight.js. One innocent import hljs from 'highlight.js'; pulls in over a Megabyte of hundreds of programming language syntax definitions. Do you really need Mathematica, "ISBL", and "GML" — or would a curated list of popular programming languages such as Python, Java, JavaScript, and HTML ("xml.js" ) be enough? This results in a massive reduction down to ~70 kilobytes. Even better: load this reduced size o…

Hightlight.js basically have two main modes of usage:

The one you complain about is specifically about importing everything, because that's what the user wants in that case, importing it like that signals that that's what the user wants.

Otherwise you can do the following:

    import hljs from 'highlight.js/lib/core';
    import javascript from 'highlight.js/lib/languages/javascript';
    hljs.registerLanguage('javascript', javascript);
Maybe the defaults should be different, but a 30 second read of the most basic information available in the repository would reveal how you can use it the way you want too, without any complication that the rest of your comment seems to want to introduce.
Post reply on HN