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Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

linen.dev

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Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#91

Post by einpoklum »

doodlesdev wrote: post #29
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.

What about a Google-searchable alternative to any of these? I think this would be one of the main selling points of Linen.

I believe several (most?) IRC servers support logging channel transcripts; and those can be easily made web-accessible. If you're not running the IRC server, you can use a logging bot to do that.

See discussion 7 years ago on serverfault.com, and the links therein:

How to set up a IRC server that logs all messages? https://serverfault.com/q/190069/113898

How to Offer Searchable IRC logs? https://serverfault.com/q/36886/113898

The bot option should be valid for Matrix as well, although there I'm not sure the bot world is well-enough developed to be 100% sure that a bot exist for every common desire like saving channel logs.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#92

Post by einpoklum »

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 don't want to host a server

Given that we're talking about search-engine-visible logs - just use an existing, public server.

> I want my messages to be synced between multiple devices including mobile ones.

I actually believe it's better for people _not_ to have Slack on their mobile, so as not to be pestered, but if that's what you want, then you want the "fancy" alternative. Matrix clients can offer you that.

> I want rich messages, images, links.

So, Matrix.

> I want threads.

If that's the case, maybe what you really want is a Discourse web-forum rather than Slack.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#93

Post by Aeolun »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #45

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) mak…

Yeah, I had the same questions. Is it a chat app, or an indexing app?

After spending some more time it seems to be a chat app that allows importing.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#94

Post by andrewxdiamond »

thex10 wrote: post #37

Not enough discussion here of the parts under "Our Optimization Strategies", which was the most interesting to me. Assorted reactions: > We found that react-icons had an issue that lead to everything being imported. This meant that we were including every single react-icon in our package whether we need it or not. Kudos to the Linen team for proactively finding this - I have a feeling tons of projects blindly trust t…

FYI there is a middle ground with the AWS SDK. If you don’t need the entire thing (you certainly do not), you can import product specific SDKs as standalone. Still quite a bit fatter than building your own HTTP client, but it’s an easy win if you already use the SDK.

ex, an s3 only Java sdk:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35591248/aws-sdk-for-s3-...

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#95

Post by __ryan__ »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #82
SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UI package appears to use Rollup. And this looks like the PR for the icons update: https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev/pull/1001

they had to change every import for an icon in 60 files. Wouldn’t it have been better if a PR was done against Rollup to fix this “bug”? probably much more difficult/not possible?

A commuter typically takes a free public bus ride to work. The bus broke down this morning. The commuter had to go out of their way to take a different bus to get to work. Wouldn’t it have been better if they stayed and fixed the first bus?

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#96

Post by Aeolun »

cheeseblubber wrote: post #10
anyfactor wrote: post #6

We actively evaluated Linen in launching our community. Although, we went with discourse as we are going for a forum type community platform but Linen certainly has fantastic potential. One very minor friction point with Linen was, it needs to be a bit transparent about their pricing for business tier. I don't think "contact us" pricing strategy is the perfect fit Linen's target audience.

Sorry about that. It was a vestige of Linen's first version being very Enterpise sales heavy and we haven't updated it. At the moment it is 150/month for 5000 members for our paid tier and 50/month more for every 5000. Will update it this week! We just shipped our self checkout flow last week: https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev/commit/61c482cab5d5aa... Just hadn't got the chance to update it on the landing page y…

Does that count active users? Or total users? Be a bit sad if you were perpetually paying for some rando that posted a message 5 months ago.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#97

Post by Aeolun »

sideproject wrote: post #89
anyfactor wrote: post #6

We actively evaluated Linen in launching our community. Although, we went with discourse as we are going for a forum type community platform but Linen certainly has fantastic potential. One very minor friction point with Linen was, it needs to be a bit transparent about their pricing for business tier. I don't think "contact us" pricing strategy is the perfect fit Linen's target audience.

I've recently launched HN+ https://www.hn.plus For anyone interested in HN-type forums (with lots of other features we've built)

Hmm, I feel like this could do with a different colored top bar. Making it look exactly like HN makes me feel more like ‘why not use HN then’?

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#98

Post by Aeolun »

urbandw311er wrote: post #68
cheeseblubber wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a paid offering. Basically it's free on Linen's domain for public communities and we let you host on your domain like: https://archive.pulumi.com/ https://linen.prefect.io/ https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/

And you guarantee in writing that this pricing structure will never change?

That wouldn’t mean anything the moment they get bought.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#99

Post by CSSer »

Aeolun wrote: post #93
rahimnathwani wrote: post #45

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) mak…

Yeah, I had the same questions. Is it a chat app, or an indexing app? After spending some more time it seems to be a chat app that allows importing.

And that's a pity because I got really excited by the prospect of the alternative. It made my gears start spinning for viable ways to accomplish that. Oh, the ideas I'd work on if I had unlimited time...

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#100

Post by MuffinFlavored »

__ryan__ wrote: post #95
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they had to change every import for an icon in 60 files. Wouldn’t it have been better if a PR was done against Rollup to fix this “bug”? probably much more difficult/not possible?

A commuter typically takes a free public bus ride to work. The bus broke down this morning. The commuter had to go out of their way to take a different bus to get to work. Wouldn’t it have been better if they stayed and fixed the first bus?

I get the proverb but you have to admit that it's kind of a big deal that a tree-shaker bundler optimizer has a pretty big glaring known broken issue with it where it doesn't bundle.

The bus gets fixed eventually. This doesn't (unless somebody fixes it).

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