I'm of half a mind to use this as a self hosted note taking app
Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
121–130 of 219 posts
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
VC game will get crazy. Most VC backed products will have their end day like Twitter has almost. Initial and middle Investors kept passing the pie to the next bigger fool and the last bigger fool is now stuck with a very expensive web property desperate to recoup the investment let alone a 10x return. Sounds like a Bitcoin food chain. And then - aggressive monitization, price hikes staff cuts, SLAs adjustments etc.
I doubt it, VC firms and their principals have a reputation, and the community is not so big that they can endlessly pass the buck like this, without suffering consequences.
This isn't a game of reputation, fundamentally.
In current economic climate if a VC is only getting 4x return on their initial investment and not the usual 10x, they'll say "oh wait, we think this 4x is still over priced, market might slump further and we care for our reputation so much therefore, please pay us only 2x" or they'll say "selling at 4x would ruin our reputation therefore let us not sell at all"?
This is the classic VC cycle, companies get sold to the next one for higher gains till the last buyer cannot find any further buyer that can pay even inflated prices neither the stock market responds that much so they end up squeezing every bit of juice of the company by raising prices, reducing free features and what not.
Heroku is one example.I can count a dozen more.
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#123It's 500kb javascript. That makes it al lot less impressive, as a lot of stuff will be done by the parser. And it seems to pull in a lot of libraries too.
Still, optimised code is cool.
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
But also, if you're just making two API calls (the use case for Linen) which are using JSON, you can get both request making and json parsing pretty much out-of-the-box without doing anything, web browsers JS API ships with this by default, window.fetch and response.json(), no "building your own HTTP client" required :) You need to have two calls at least, generate a signed URL and then actually uploading it. How man…
What about retries, status code handling, timeouts, and backoff? (It's not a lot of code to add that stuff in but I still call it a "client".)
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#125The linked blogpost is a message in the blog channel, https://www.linen.dev/s/linen/c/blog. Brilliant!
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Clean and functional perhaps, but based on that screenshot, I would agree that it needs a lot of UI work.
The bold text being the same size and weight as the username while having the same alignment, the reply icons being the same size as the user icons, no real spacing difference between the username and post content vs the username and post above it, the spacing in general mostly separates things rather than organize things... and that's just from looking at one screenshot. Compare it to a screenshot for slack: while there are surely things you might like more than the slack interface, you can deny that through holistically manipulating alignment, spacing, text size and weight, scale, etc. you can instantly visually parse what's grouped and what's not, what are people's usernames, what's message content, what's metadata and what's reaction/reply content, etc. all while packing more on the screen. Simple things like visual hierarchy and gestalt do a lot of work for them.
That stuff is crucial for an efficient corporate messaging application that needs to be easily visually parsable.
UI design (and most other visual work) is much deeper and more difficult than most developers realize. Laymen familiar with CSS frameworks can make something that looks designed in their estimation, but when it comes to functionality, it falls flat every time. This is why we need more designers in FOSS.
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#127Earlier 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?
Many javascript programmers including library authors don't understand the tree shaking mechanisms available to them. Setting the "sideEffects" property in package.json can be very effective in detailing whether to include/exclude an entire module or certain source files:
https://webpack.js.org/guides/tree-shaking/#mark-the-file-as...
All popular bundlers (webpack, rollup, esbuild) respect that field.
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
But also, if you're just making two API calls (the use case for Linen) which are using JSON, you can get both request making and json parsing pretty much out-of-the-box without doing anything, web browsers JS API ships with this by default, window.fetch and response.json(), no "building your own HTTP client" required :) You need to have two calls at least, generate a signed URL and then actually uploading it. How man…
What about retries, status code handling, timeouts, and backoff? (It's not a lot of code to add that stuff in but I still call it a "client".)
AWS doesn’t do that for you either.
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#129It's cool they're using a touch of elixir for the websockets
Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative
#130Is it possible/legal to create third party chat clients for services like Slack?
For me, the biggest barrier for adopting an alternative to Slack (or Facebook Messenger) is that no one else will switch with me.
It would be great if Slack could simply become an API for a chat client I prefer.