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Show HN: Bema: Work messaging built for humans (getbema.app)

2 points by ben_d ↗ HN
Hi HN! I'm Ben, the founder of Bema. I've been frustrated with the current state of work messaging software for a while now, and I've heard similar complaints from friends and coworkers. (Too many channels, easy to lose things, distracted from actual work.) I set out to build a platform that would encourage asynchronous communication with an option to break glass if needed. Here's the result, let me know what you think.

11 comments

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jon-wood
While I applaud the sentiment here how many people work for an organisation that would be ok giving full Slack access to something like this, especially given the complete lack of information on how that data is being processed beyond an incredibly vague mention of Cloudflare in the privacy policy?
skinfaxi
While I am of the same mind, many orgs have no idea what people are connecting to what. You can hook up slack with an unofficial mcp using tokens taken from your web session and your IT department would be none the wiser.
drcongo
It says "Connect with your current messaging provider" and then never mentions that ability again. What does that look like?

Personally, I absolutely despise what Slack has become and would love to replace it, but I can't see anything about this app that might persuade me or my coworkers to install it.

edit: Don't mean to sound harsh about what you've built, but that page is not selling the app for you!

hmokiguess
Signal to noise ratio is such a frustrating problem to solve.

I really wish you succeed and I will take whoever claims that space if they manage to do it right, I am burnt out from all messaging apps and utterly dissatisfied with where things are.

I wish we stayed on IRC, that was peak.

solyin
The no interruptions thing is neat but oh god, tags?

Zulip's got the channel/topic thing right. You join the #engineering channel and then there's the "PostgreSQL migration" topic.

Any new system has to not be shit at threads like slack is.

CEOatMindfries
I don't know how much people are still into social media stuffs to make it better. But people need something which can make the life easier, nowadays it's tough to involve in so many things.
perryraskin
Derrick Reimer tried this a bunch of years ago with Level. In short, it didn’t work. But many of us understand the desire for something like this.

His repo: https://github.com/derrickreimer/level

ben_d
Thanks for linking this; just read through his post-mortem. Lot's of good stuff there to mull over, especially his bit about low customer motivation to actually seek out/engage with Slack alternatives. It's a challenge, and it's been one of the top things on my mind since approaching MVP. I've been working to make the transition from Slack as easy as possible, but that's obviously just one hurdle of many in this area.