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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With icons, I've stopped using icon libraries a while back and now import just the SVG code that I need. I'm a big fan of Hero Icons[1] and they offer a way to quickly copy JSX or SVG code to the clipboard to faciliate this workflow. [1]: https://heroicons.com/

Radix icon also good: https://icons.radix-ui.com/

[deleted]

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#182
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…

With icons, I've stopped using icon libraries a while back and now import just the SVG code that I need. I'm a big fan of Hero Icons[1] and they offer a way to quickly copy JSX or SVG code to the clipboard to faciliate this workflow. [1]: https://heroicons.com/

Another one: Material Design Icons, https://pictogrammers.com/library/mdi/

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#183

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, the "Google searchable" copy specifically is a red flag for me. Does that mean I need to let Google index my corporate conversations?

100%, I just closed the tab straight away. No thanks.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#184
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…

> Kudos to the Linen team for proactively finding this - I have a feeling tons of projects blindly trust that tree-shaking their dependencies will "just work" even though for many libraries it won't!

For one particular microsoft product, this is brought to attention by documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/developer/compo...

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the "Google searchable" copy specifically is a red flag for me. Does that mean I need to let Google index my corporate conversations?

They are positively fixated on being "google searchable" in a way that is really bizarre.

I don't see why you'd think it's bizarre. Using Google for inbound links was practically Stack Overflow's raison d'etre. If someone searches their question, finds an answer almost immediately via a search engine (doesn't have to be Google), and never bothers your customer support agents, then both parties are better off.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#186
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 organi…

I heard Zulip team is working on UI improvements https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen...

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#187

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, the "Google searchable" copy specifically is a red flag for me. Does that mean I need to let Google index my corporate conversations?

So don't use it for corporate conversations? There's already Slack for that. Corporation's private internal communication just isn't the target market.

The issue is the public side of projects that are using Slack or Discord to answer questions. Those questions have to be answered again and again by the poor employee instead of the answer being searchable (via Google, or other search engine).

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#188
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. >…

Linen looks kinda neat though. I wonder if it could be morphed into a good Matrix client. :thinking:

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/368…

For Matrix – view.matrix.org, as noted elsewhere in the thread. Instead of a bot, it's a lightweight Matrix client which doesn't support auth, and renders everything server-side.

It's not too pretty though, but definitely usable: https://view.matrix.org/room/!SzcRUxcpYurpoctOzk:matrix.org

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#190

I highly recommend front end devs add a step to their CI pipeline which extracts bundle size information from the build and includes it in pull requests, or something similar. It's great to have eyes on how heavy your bundle is, and keeping an eye on how it changes over time (easy to add as part of the pipeline) can help the team understand when things are trending the right way or not. It's usually a call you need t…

RelativeCI founder & bundle-stats maintainer here, thank you for the mention, Tom!

I totally agree with the need to run bundle analysis checks often for medium/large-size applications. It will help to notice the issues when they are introduced, otherwise, the optimization task becomes really challenging. Actually, I built bundle-stats & RelativeCI after spending weeks on optimization tasks running hundreds of slow builds, staring at multiple webpack-bundle-analyzer reports, and using google spreadsheets to track asset/module changes.

One thing I noticed in the last 2-3 years is that we got better as an industry at managing the bundle size bloat: - improved libraries - new light versions for popular libraries - new and improved bundlers - new and improved meta frameworks - better tooling & more resources

However, the web applications we are building now are larger and more complex than before, with hundreds of bundled libraries and tens of thousands of modules. The increased complexity has made the bundle analyzing and optimizing even more complicated. One of the most common feedback I received was to better integrate the bundle analysis and insights during the code review phase and allow developers to detect and fix the issues as soon as they are introduced: - [done] Pull request comment with bundle analysis insights & summary (https://relative-ci.com/documentation/setup/configure/integr...) - [in progress] pending/approve/reject review flow based on custom rules

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