Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
Previously I worked on a popular open source project which had a sizable Slack community. Slack was great for engaging with community members and with early sales. However as community scales Slack becomes this black hole where context becomes lost. Most public communities can’t afford to pay for several hundred/thousand members so they are limited to 10,000 free messages. You run into the problem of people asking repeat questions and not searching in Slack. It also doesn’t help that the Slack UX encourages posting and not searching. We experimented with Github discussions and Discourse but didn’t want another channel to maintain and split the community on.
With Linen I wanted to build a tool that is very low maintenance without changing my current workflow. By making it search engine friendly and putting it on a website the community members can find answers to repeat questions before ever getting into your Slack channel. Linen is the first result that comes up on Google if you search for “seeing a weird issue with flyte” https://www.google.com/search?q=seeing+a+weird+issue+with+fl... or “replace beast http with proxygen” https://www.google.com/search?q=replace+beast+http+with+prox....
As a side effect of syncing conversation to a website you end up with a very long tail of unique and relevant content for your community. Linen is free to use and get setup but I offer a paid version (I am still figuring out the pricing model for it) where you can get the content redirected to your own subdomain where your domain gets all the SEO benefits.
Linen is built with Nextjs, Node, Typescript, React, Prisma for the ORM and using AWS aurora for the Postgres db. I chose Nextjs for the server side rendering capabilities and wanted to share types between client side with Typescript. I’ve also enjoyed working with Prisma as the ORM since you don’t have to write a lot of boilerplate with other ORMs. I've also been pretty happy with Vercel and Nextjs especially with the server side rendering and client side caching it provides.
Here are a few communities on Linen right now:
https://community-chat.infracost.io/
https://community-chat.signoz.io/
The product is very simple right now but I want to add features like related questions detection with semantic similarity, integrating with Github to notify the thread when it is finished, auto thread detection for conversations that aren’t in thread form.
You can sign up for free today at https://www.linen.dev. I am doing manual onboarding at the moment to get better feedback and to manually walkthrough some of the less polished parts of the boarding flow.
p.s. I’m actively working on supporting Discord on Linen so would love to hear from anyone that is interested
59 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadNeat idea :)
For scaling wise the I host the webapp on Vercel where it is backed by lambda functions. I also am using AWS aurora for postgres which in theory should help a ton with scaling the DB. I've done Heroku db hosting before but found that AWS tends to be much cheaper.
Might be awkward to deal with things like updating threads, but just editing the s3 file containing the json response for a given thread might work, and then you can skip having a database entirely.
I'm doing some aggressive caching with Vercel and Nextjs which essentially turns in to putting the data in S3.
It isn't very scalable, though. Last time I checked it would handle few dozens of concurrent queries, at most.
But for fulltext search, what really makes sense is something like OpenSearch.
https://api.slack.com/methods/conversations.list
https://api.slack.com/methods/conversations.history
https://api.slack.com/events/message
Your interface is much more accessible not just to Google, but also to this human. I would love to have an option to migrate off Slack with continuity.
I want to explore making this tool available for internal teams once I have more features around productivity like related questions, summarization and confluence/docs integration. These seem useful for internal teams but need to assess whether people actually want this.
Also, this is very useful! Thanks for building it. (Ideally it's bundled with clear info that everything people are writing will be publicly searchable. Perhaps an invisible bot message every month or so.)
This sounds like something that may interest you: https://zulip.com/help/web-public-streams
I guess that won't happen until someone starts hosting discourse for free.
Awesome that Linen is trying to build a different future though.
Slack does have threads but you never know about updates unless you're already chatting in the thread.
Slack just feels like email before threads got grouped together.
Don't get me wrong, Slack is a great chat tool for small groups and it's a bonus that others can search it. But forums are far superior for large groups and long lived conversations.
That said, I'd worry about a chat solution being too focused on a small niche like developers (who often aren't that interested in paying for tools, even if they're high quality).
[0]: https://blog.gitter.im/2020/09/30/gitter-element-acquisition...
Two bits of feedback:
1. The threading seems off in places. I looked at the linked osquery site, and there were some top-level items that seemed like replies. Maybe that's just a result of people replying in a channel instead of a thread, though.
2. I see character entities in code sections, instead of their corresponding characters. For example, an XML snippet has tag names surrounded by < and > instead of < and > (example: https://osquery.fleetdm.com/t/5378/Anyone-can-point-me-to-so...).
2. Oh good catch. We just rewrote our message rendering so there is some bugs we have to fix.
I'm guessing that essentially it is up to the Slack admin to ensure all participants have agreed to their conversations being made available to the world?
At the moment most people who come in to these Slack channels kind of treat it like Stackoverflow or customer support for technical tools.
At the moment most people who come in to these Slack channels kind of treat it like Stackoverflow or customer support for technical tools
For the most part they will assume a conversation limited to members of the community they have joined.
Other solutions I have considered is only syncing specific channels and making it explicit that Linen is making these conversation public. Definitely a gray area right now and would love any suggestions around this.
There are lots of open-source communities there, I imagine it would be helpful for debugging (and discovery of Matrix itself).
We used slackarchive before but it got disabled because of the ToS. The 10k message limit is specifically imposed by slack to get people to upgrade so they very much don’t want it subverted.
I can't count how many messages I have missed on Slack because Slack assumed that I read them when in fact I did not.