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Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable
Hi HN! Kam here. I’m the founder of Linen.dev https://linen.dev https://linen.dev, a website that makes your public Slack community Google searchable. Linen will sync your Slack threads and make it SEO friendly so your community can find Slack content that was previously hidden.
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+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+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://osquery.fleetdm.com/ https://osquery.fleetdm.com/
https://discuss.flyte.io/ https://discuss.flyte.io/
https://calendso.linen.dev/ https://calendso.linen.dev/
https://community-chat.infracost.io/ https://community-chat.infracost.io/
https://community-chat.signoz.io/ https://community-chat.signoz.io/
https://airbytehq.linen.dev/ https://airbytehq.linen.dev/
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 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
- gampleman 4y agoHow does this not breach Slack’s TOS? I thought they specifically prohibited tools like this? 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.
- soulchild37 4y agoI really hope you succeed, but I think this breaches the Slack ToS
- yurishimo 4y agoIf you can share, how do you retrieve data from the Slack group? Scraping as an invited user? A public slack app? For some communities, that could be a massive amount of webhook traffic! Neat idea :)
- cheeseblubber 4y agoSure! Right now a community admin that adds Linen to your Slack workspace. I have webhooks listening for any message events which gets mirror and saved to the Aurora postgres DB. On install I also have a cronjob that hits the Slack api and pulls the old Slack conversations. 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.
- maxmcd 4y agoSince your data is append-only have you considered something like just sticking all of the data in s3? 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.
- cheeseblubber 4y agoOh interesting. I think like you said updates might be a little bit tricky as well as search. I'm using full text search from Postgres so that would be tough on S3. I'm doing some aggressive caching with Vercel and Nextjs which essentially turns in to putting the data in S3.