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Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
31–40 of 143 posts
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#32This is one of the first Slack competitors that has caught my attention. I really think you're on to something here. I have one thought after watching the video (other than a generally positive feeling about it): It feels, somehow, less personal. Where Slack rooms felt like digital _rooms_, this gave me the feeling of an office bulletin board. I'm imagining being a new employee at a company that is fully bought in on…
Founder here. Jason (OP) and I think about this a lot. The balance of cluttering everyone's names on the left panel, v/s making it feel like you're in the same room as these people.
If you look at feed based platforms, they tend to get very asynchronous (almost forum like). And so our design for the real-timeness of the feed was to emphasize the fact that you're in this room with these people, and they're talking right now. It's really fun when a new thread pops up, or a new chat emerges in the feed. That is exciting.
I think perhaps it would help to show a list of online people, so you feel like starting a conversation. Or, perhaps, just seeing other people participate would help. There's surely room to optimize to get the conversations going.
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#33This is awesome. Discord is the worst for trying to search and follow threads of information. Seems like I'm always answering the same questions over and over again.
I don’t see this going after discord but Slack or teams perhaps?
Founder here. Struct is designed for both teams and communities. Because the problems affecting Slack and Discord are the same. We already have a bunch of community features, like publicly indexable knowledge base from threads, public-to-internet channels -- which are being used by many OSS companies (list on home page).
Teams is a different product. Companies who use Teams are there because they have tight integration with Microsoft Office, which is the USP there.
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#34This is awesome. Discord is the worst for trying to search and follow threads of information. Seems like I'm always answering the same questions over and over again.
Discord will inevitably add LLM-based search like Slack AI just announced, and you won't have that problem anymore.
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#35[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was about to say the same thing - I use Zulip at current employment - and after you get used to it it’s pretty great software that already solves all the problems struct aims to (without the AI nonsense)
Founder of Struct here. I looked at Zulip before starting Struct. And I'm sorry -- I don't think it's the same. Threads in Zulip are really sub-channels, and the idea of a unified feed like "All Threads" doesn't exist -- at least, that was my perception of Zulip. And just looking at the site right now, it feels the same as before. I could be wrong. Struct is different. It's a reimagination of what a chat platform wou…
> unified feed like "All Threads"
I don't understand why I'd need or want this. I saw it in the video and was horrified. Multiple feeds updating as I'm watching them is just too much going on.
When I'm chatting, I don't want to pay attention to 10 different things at once. I'm most productive when I am working on one task (with a single topic), which may require me to refer back to Slack periodically.
Struct looks like it has two differentiating features: 1) it surfaces irrelevant distractions in the All Threads channel, and 2) it creates the tl;dr summary. The former seems actively harmful to productivity, and the latter seems like it could be useful.
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#37God, I was interested in the pitch until "and AI". I'm just so, so tired of LLMs and having to work around all the new and surprising ways they don't quite work the way they're supposed to. At the very least, when other programs don't work the way I want them to, I can usually get used to the issue or find a workaround sometimes. When something is AI-powered, I just have to kind of resign myself to the fact that some…
Founder here.
TLDR: AI word is overthrown these days, sorry about that. But, what makes Struct different isn't AI. It's feeds and threads.
Longer version: The AI in Struct is, IMO, a balanced approach. Struct is different, not because of AI. It's different because of going hard on feeds and threads.
And AI helps in generating titles and summaries for threads -- something which pre-2023 me would have basically asked the user to create. In fact, that was the original idea that users would set their own titles for threads. But, users are forgetful and threads deviate from their intended purpose. And that's where AI can really help -- keep both title and summary up to date.
And you could stop there with the AI.
But, then you start playing with Struct bot, and it's ability to recall bits of information from older threads -- that's really nice. It's saved me so much digging around, personally. But, it's optional, you never have to talk to it.
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#38I installed the chatbot on my discord but it’s not indexing anything, do I need to sign up for a trial or something like that? It’s my own little discord server so I have a super low volume of messages :-) https://bembem.struct.ai/
Manish, founder here. On Discord, the bot only picks up Discord threads, not the chats in a channel. Could that be it? Unless there's some issue with sync.
That must be it! I don't really have any threads I don't think. Oh so Struct uses that as boundary to summarize? Makes sense, although a lot of Slack and Discord servers don't really use threads. Like, the golang one in Slack specifically asks people to NOT use threads, out of some usability concern, I think (screen readers or something).
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#39[dead]
Re: Show HN: Struct – A Feed-Centric Chat Platform
#40BTW I think this is brilliant because summarization is one of those things where AI works really well.
Out of curiosity, I wonder if you could share some of the tech you used? Any dgraph or badger under the hood by any chance? :-) How about hosting? Big three or something else? K8s or no? Elastic Search? etc.
Edit: Also curious if struct is supposed to online scrape slack/discord or become and standalone chat app now/in the future.