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Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

linen.dev

201–210 of 219 posts

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#201
Chat is pretty trivial: Everybody logs into a server. One person types a line of text, and it replicates on everybody's computer.

It sounds like an exercise for a CS student's first TCP/IP program.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that there's something wrong about the modern Web when a chat program taking 500kb (gzipped!) is an impressive technical achievement to be proud of?

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#202
post #201

Chat is pretty trivial: Everybody logs into a server. One person types a line of text, and it replicates on everybody's computer. It sounds like an exercise for a CS student's first TCP/IP program. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that there's something wrong about the modern Web when a chat program taking 500kb (gzipped!) is an impressive technical achievement to be proud of?

It's the 80/20 ratio - going from working MVP of a chat app takes about 5kb, but then you have literally nothing else that makes something like linen or slack usable for lots of different edge cases (styling, file uploads, channels, UI, etc)

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#203

I thought perhaps this was another "open-source" "free-unless-you're-a-business" product, but the license is actually AGPL, so you can go host this yourself regardless of use case. You just have to share any modifications you make.

where did you even find the source/license?

I'm probably too dumb. clicked some 20 places and still nothing. only find their unlinked to source marketing nonsense "Linen is an open source".

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#205

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'm a big fan of IRC and have used it for many years, but one thing I notice about younger generation of techies is, they won't tolerate poor/low tech UI/UX. I see this in gaming all the time as well ... old classic games, esp. RPGs, dont get love because of the graphics and UX (keyboard controls).

I would half-agree with you. In much of the younger generation, there is a fetish for a certain kind of UX: The kind that reminds you of a smartphone; low density; anti-keyboard-orientation; maybe I could add a few more characterizations maybe. The thing is, though - that UX is often inferior - in itself, or because of it relies on very heavy infrastructure like a browser engine.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#206
post #192
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the first result, and has a landing page with all the information you need. Maybe you should really Google that first. Asking intelligent questions, but doing some of the legwork yourself would get better results in my experience. Wasting people's time by asking them with 0 context provided (so they know your level of expertise) often gets them to repeat to you what could have been discovered in 30 seconds. You…

> You waste your time. You waste their time. It's a selfish thing to do. I disagree, evidenced by the many other commentators who clearly wanted to discuss. I feel the only time wasted has been in trying to police comments on a comment thread eliciting uncurated information. Have a good day wherever you may be.

> I feel the only time wasted has been in trying to police comments on a comment thread eliciting uncurated information.

I disagree. I don't think anyone has tried to police anything here. I sent you down the best path to get the information you wanted quickly, and I was the first one to reply to your question. You're welcome. Have a nice day.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to express how much I dislike Discord as a user why anyone ever thought hyperactive gamer chat was the right way to offer community and support to their tech product is beyond me I also don't want it in Slack - Slack is office chat for my job, I don't want to be adding random other stuff in there Please just use a forum. Discourse seems to be the good/popular one.

Forums are still used a lot, you would think this would result in forum software that's great, but no Discourse is a horrible experience by default. Discourse is so horrible people would rather use Discord or Reddit - that's how horrible it is.

In what way?

I think I recognise the Discourse forum software across several sites I've used (correct me if I'm wrong about any of these these someone!):

- https://discuss.ocaml.org/

- https://forum.rescript-lang.org/

- https://discuss.huggingface.co/

- https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/

- https://discuss.pytorch.org/

- https://forum.strapi.io/ (maybe)

I don't know if it's a pain to run for maintainers or something, but as a user I have found the experience on these sites infinitely preferable to Discord

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's great to hear.

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#209

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.

That’s because they started as a static indexable host for Slack/Discord. The real-time chat features appear to be brand-new (to me atleast).

Re: Linen.dev: A 500 kb Slack alternative

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't know what to tell you, I've never had any difficulty parsing a zulip page. And I definitely appreciate the sobriety.

A lot of non-developers that use some cobbled together amalgam of tutorial code pasted into wordpress themes never have any performance problems with their site. If people are using these things for their own personal projects, then who cares. If they're posing them as in industrial tool, someone with a better vantage point should probably tell them they're about to step in shit.

Different people have different use cases. Many people-- support, customer service, incident response, etc. need to be able to parse those screens incredibly quickly all day long. The small amounts of time that people spend visually orienting themselves on these pages not only takes up time, it unnecessarily imposes a cognitive load. While you could have a code editor that used the glyphs, cursor, and layout of a word processor, and a low-volume coder might not even care, for most developers, it would just be exhausting to visually parse all day long. For many people, communication tools are essentially their code editors and their work is often far more time sensitive than a developer's.

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