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Show HN: Booklet – Async forums as an alternative to chat
I built Booklet to solve the problem of too many chat messages at work.
Booklet updates classic internet forums and email groups to have a modern UI and high polish. It organizes communications into threads, and summarizes activities into a neat email newsletter - so members can stay updated without having to stay logged in. The async format promotes deeper discussions, while also increasing engagement by making conversations easy to follow.
My goal is to make communications more asynchronous - so that I can get back to work, instead of slacking all day. Most early communities have been hobby groups, but my goal is to mature Booklet into a tool that sits alongside Slack in companies.
Try it out, and let me know what you think!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tbird24 3y agoI would give my left arm to be using internet forums again. Online communities adopting Discord and Slack was such a terrible move in hindsight. Definitely rooting for this to take off.
- philip1209 3y agoThank you - try it out and let me know what you think. Based on the launch feedback so far today, I think I need to build a Slack integration - primarily as a separate channel to deliver the daily newsletter. It seems like lots of people don't even open their work email anymore, so the chat + forum need to work together. I wrote more about why chat fails for work communication in my launch post here - summarized as "our workplace communication looks like the floor of a 1980s stock exchange, not a place for writing code." https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-booklet/ https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-booklet/
- qingcharles 3y agoBe careful with users hounding you for features, especially ones like you specify. Think of HN here. How many feature requests have they implemented over the last 10 years?
- philip1209 3y agoThat's a great point, and I'm conscious of it. I try to take a first-principles approach to building. For instance, a few people have requested "pinned posts." I personally don't want the same post stuck at the top of my screen forever, and upon digging in deeper I find that people really want a "Welcome" post that all new users see and can access. So, I'm exploring some ways of accomplishing that without pinning - such as a dismissible post for new members.
- victorbjorklund 3y agoAgreed. Im so thankful for the few remaining good forums like elixirforum.com etc. So sad that discord really hijacked all of the communities (of course i understand people choose it because it is good but still)
- guntherhermann 3y agoI think it's popular because it's easy / free to set up and the friction is very low for new user, not because it's actually any good. I think it's actually horrendous for things you want to use forums for. I don't remember using IRC in lieu of forums (did we?), why do we use Discord for the same?
- philip1209 3y agoThose insights are things I've tried to bake into Booklet - for instance, a really generous free plan and no per-user pricing. Existing community platforms (like Circle) are not set up for bottoms-up adoption, so it ends up feeling like gross enterprise software.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThey choose it because its engaging. Discord is really good at sucking you into conversation and capturing your attention/time. Its way better than IRC ever was. But that doesn't mean its a good format for information, issue threads, work discussion and such.
- srsqsonyl 3y agoThis take feels like twee projection of anecdata. There are thousands of forums that require sign up just to read posts. Always has been.
- hinkley 3y agoI would give my left arm to stop having to check work email for the five people who still use it. Something in the middle sounds lovely.
- philip1209 3y agoDo you use Slack? My impression after today's launch is that I need to deliver Booklet's daily summary over Slack, not just email. Would that work better for you?
- robertlagrant 3y agoThat could work nicely, yes.
- hinkley 3y agoWe use teams but slack is common enough. It’s really a social issue more than a technical one. How to get people to stop playing, “guess which platform I sent you an urgent message on, which nobody else you work with uses to contact you, ever?” Threading and history I think are necessary for the email thread set.
- philip1209 3y agoYes, I agree. Email got ruined by external users - scams, spam, and marketing. Chat is nice for companies because everybody inside is trusted. The irony is not lost on me that Booklet is almost rebuilding email, but for internal-only usage. I think about this a lot.
- neilv 3y ago> I would give my left arm to be using internet forums again. Online communities adopting Discord and Slack was such a terrible move in hindsight. Was also a terrible move in foresight. :)
- sakopov 3y agoAbsolutely. We've made a full circle and I'm very happy that products like this are becoming a thing again.
- mrd3v0 3y agoIt's not like chat hasn't existed for decades, it definitely has been in foresight for many. I think what attracted people to these platforms is the ease of use and plug n play nature of centralised software compared to forums that have much less intuitive UX and have only recently adopted federation making the very vast majority of them lacking in interoperability.
- philip1209 3y agoAbsolutely. Two big drivers were: 1. People are impatient, and chat makes everything urgent 2. Chat make posting easy, so authors post more and with less intentionality I wrote a long post about this on our blog as I announced Booklet: https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-booklet/ https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-booklet/
- AhmadIbrahim 3y agoI believe we need to standarize forums api so we can build readers as well to see all the forums you are subscribed to in one place instead of jumping between websites
- ss2f 3y agoIf you like the old school bulletinBoards + standardized protocol, then you may like LemmyBB. An homage to the classic forums with the reach of activitypub protocol: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
- philip1209 3y agoIMO, email and RSS are the universal APIs of the internet. Booklet already supports email, and I'm considering adding private RSS feeds.
- philomath_mn 3y agoI am dumbfounded by the number of people signing up for these chat-based communities. Do people scroll through the threads? Are they watching notifications come through? Chat works great for a small group of friends, I don't think it is a good fit for a community
- hutzlibu 3y agoSome telegram groups developed as some sort of community. "Do people scroll through the threads?" Most won't, so the same things and questions get discussed again and again. If the mod is engaged he will create sticky notes, but people also often ignore those. So - yeah, I agree. Not a good fit for a community. They sort of upgrade it though regulary, and now you can have subgroups in groups that can work as forum threads, but I experience it not as a good UX and I regulary delete telegram as it is really hard filtering out useful comments from noise.
- a1o 3y agoI hate that forums changed from Simple Machine Forums or PHPBB to Discourse, the ui in Discourse is terrible and I find it unfriendly for community feeling - it doesn't invite customization, discourse design looks like an airport bathroom.
- davidcollantes 3y agoI disagree. I find Discourse superb. From the user’s perspective it is simple, clean, fast, with amazing search, etc. It can be customised, but most people using it do it for practical reasons, and worry little about customisations.
- sznio 3y ago>fast Discourse is definitely not fast. Whenever Google sends me to a discourse page I just end up giving up on waiting for it after staring for over 8 seconds at a blank page.
- hutzlibu 3y agoI .. guess there are different standards or point of views what counts as clean and fast? I experience it as very slow and bloated, even though it somewhat improved.
- comex 3y agoI experience it as fast compared to traditional, pre-SPA-era web forums; the use of JavaScript speeds up a lot of interactions that would otherwise require a full page load. The live Markdown preview is also a heck of a lot better than having to click “preview” and wait for a page load to see your BBCode rendered. Having live updates for new posts/edits without having to refresh contributes to a snappy feeling. And I think the visual theming is nice and clean. Still, compared to a good email client, it’s not so fast. Which is why I personally read Discourse forums mainly via email, only visiting the actual site for long threads or when I want to reply. It’s not perfect, since Discourse allows editing posts but doesn’t notify email users of edits. But it’s fine. I actually like it better than real mailing lists, because I prefer Discourse’s composing interface.
- smallerfish 3y agoThe goal is good. Can you open up a sandboxed forum so that people don't need to register to try the product out? I think you'll get much higher conversion if people can see what it looks like before they commit to registering.
- philip1209 3y agoThanks! Yes, communities can be public - check out https://hq.booklet.group https://hq.booklet.group which is a public forum where I share updates about booklet. For something with more data, check out https://demo.booklet.group https://demo.booklet.group I also tried making a little video demo + walkthrough of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf03XsD4pvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf03XsD4pvo
- mdaniel 3y agoclicking on any one of those hq.booklet headings gets the turtle in FF due to it taking 1.66 seconds to load, and worse(!) there's no UI confirmation of the click so I thought for sure it was some kind of JS kaboom that ate my onclick. The /replies is 1.78 seconds but that bothers me less are you getting hugged to death or what? --- you'll also want to exercise caution leaving user-provided filenames in the URI as that's some pentester funsies: https://bklt-storage.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/p4x0bznob52y5uhks12k9e7x6jf9?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22Screenshot%202023-09-13%20at%2010.22.40.png%22%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27Screenshot%25202023-09-13%2520at%252010.22.40.png&response-content-type=image%2Fpng https://bklt-storage.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/p4x0bznob52y...
- philip1209 3y agoThanks for the tips! I'll take a look - requests are typically super fast, so perhaps the database is just under high load due to launch. I'll check now. (I run replicas in a couple cities on https://fly.io https://fly.io, so general latency should be low too.) For the filenames - I'll take a look. I'm using some popular libraries for files, which I hope address things like this.
- urza 3y agoIf I can't self host it and own the data, I am not interested.
- philip1209 3y agoSelf-hosted forums already exist (like Discourse), but adoption has been low. I fully support self-hosted forums, but I think they'll never achieve mainstream without a hosted option.
- omgmajk 3y agoI am also interested in self-hosting, I really dig the design and interface but not being able to self-host is a no-go for me. Discourse is just terrible overall and the only other real alternative is xenforo which is extremely pricy.
- philip1209 3y agoI'm absolutely open to supporting self-hosting under some kind of enterprise license, similar to Github. If this is something you're interested in, shoot me an email and we can try it out.
- PenguinCoder 3y agoI would be interested in a self-hosted version as well; though have additional questions about administrative items. A return to forums and not a 'feed of high engagement' is sorely needed I think. Unfortunately, so are moderator tools and certain things of a web application that people have come to expect.
- philip1209 3y agoYes, that’s why I don’t support “open signups” yet - I want to avoid spam fighting for now. There are some moderation tools build in, and some where the API is done but just needs a front end finished. Which major features do you feel are missing? Send me an email (Philip at contraption.co) and we can discuss self hosting.
- Gys 3y agoLove the design
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- turtlebits 3y agoI watched the video on the landing page and TBH, it looks like a basic CRUD app and didn't see anything interesting over a regular forum. Real time editing doesn't seem like a useful feature unless you expect people to keep threads open.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- butz 3y agoChecked out demo @ https://demo.booklet.group https://demo.booklet.group , cannot see scrollbar on Firefox. Weird.
- qingcharles 3y agoNor on Chrome.
- lowercased 3y agoSeems fine on lynx. ;)
- marcellus23 3y agonot on Safari either. Maybe an intentional choice?
- bberenberg 3y agoIt's a light purple bar within the dark purple bar on the right. Not sure why the design is like this.
- userbinator 3y agoThe OP describes it as "modern UI", and that's exactly the type of stuff you're seeing.
- vekker 3y agoIt's funny how something so simple & essential like a missing scrollbar can be an instant deal-breaker.
- philip1209 3y agoI had disabled the scroll bar because I use infinite scrolling all over the app, and the scroll bar was jumping around like crazy as more content loaded. In addition, some pages had scroll bars, but shorter page did not - so as I clicked between pages there were layout shifts as the scrollbar appeared then disappeared. How do other solve this? Based on the reactions here, it seems like hiding the scroll bar may not be the best approach.
- omarfarooq 3y agoHow much control of the design we get?
- philip1209 3y agoIt’s free to make an account, so you can jump in and play around with it. Right now it supports a custom brand color, logo, optional separate logo for dark backgrounds, and icon. (There’s some fun code for determining where and how to use the brand color to maintain sufficient color contrast). If there are missing controls you want let me know!
- candiddevmike 3y agoWhy would someone use this over something like Lemmy? Are there any plans for self hosting?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- joemi 3y agoFrom the homepage: "Booklet is a modern discussion forum and member directory for professional groups. It sends calm, automated summaries to everybody so that they stay informed and engaged."
- qwerty456127 3y agoTo me team chats always felt horrible, email felt tolerable and the HN-like tree view always felt the best, near-perfect form of communication. I hope people are going to move this way occasionally.
- KirillPanov 3y agoEmail had the tree view decades before HN existed. If your email client doesn't show you that, find a better email client.
- gdprrrr 3y agoIf only other people would care to respond to the correct mail insgead of the latest
- mbreese 3y agoWant to talk about inline replies vs top-posting next? That’s always another great frustration. We’ve apparently already had that discussion though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233
- u801e 3y agoWhat people really want is to type their reply without having to include the original message in their response. That's how most people comment on places like Hacker News and Reddit.
- qwerty456127 3y ago> What people really want is to type their reply without having to include the original message in their response. Who said they have to? I doubt many people even care, previous messages are just included recursively by all the major email client apps by default. I suspect most of the people don't even know.
- douglaswlance 3y agoHow are forums not just a different style of chat room where anyone can make a new room?
- sourcecodeplz 3y agoHistory
- blangk 3y agoCategorisation tends to be better. And each post tends to compete in a page view of all posts, versus a stream of things in many cases.
- mikepurvis 3y agoIt's kind of a subtle thing, but I think the hierarchy of topics (listed newest first) and posts (shown by topic, oldest-first) matters a lot. Creating a new topic is a much more thoughtful and intentional activity under that model than when your "room" is just a continuous chatbox with replies often accidentally posted to the main instead of being properly threaded.
- CountGeek 3y agoNot sure yet how this compares to Flarum - https://freeflarum.com/ https://freeflarum.com/ you can self-host too https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KirillPanov 3y agoIs there a demo forum we can look at without having to set up an account? That would be a good idea. Also please make sure it works without javascript, like discourse does. It can be ugly with JS turned off; people who turn off JS don't care about pretty.
- qingcharles 3y agohttps://demo.booklet.group https://demo.booklet.group
- _jplc 3y agoAren't async forums just forums
- cammil 3y agoNo. They are special. I'm being facetious. Take note all ye.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jader201 3y agoYeah, not sure “async forums” conveys what OP is trying to convey. Maybe “real-time forums” or “live forums”. They’re async as in the technical ‘async’, vs. async as in “async communication” (which is what you’re saying). But the key is that you don’t have to force an update — updates happen in real-time, even edits (they’re pushed). In traditional forums, you’re forced to pull updates. TLDR: it has the feel of chat, with the structure of forums.
- charles_f 3y agoThis sounds somewhat similar to the concept of channels in Teams, wherein channels are subjects, and you create new topics and the discussion is canalized on those channels. You can also have email recaps of the conversations in your channels. On paper it's a good idea, in practice I found it cumbersome. It requires for people to think a little about how to structure their conversation, and thinking is hard, too hard when you can just send a disorganized group chat.
- lowercased 3y agoCan't recall if any current tools have this, but being able to take a set of existing comments and make a new room/thread from those would help enable people who want to provide thread hygiene after the fact. Being able to do that would allow people to not be as concerned about when/where/how they start a 'thread', because... you don't always know in the moment where something will go.
- Operyl 3y agoOn Zulip you can move messages to another topic[0]. Streams are the concept of "channels" on Zulip, and Topics are your threads. On discord, if you use the reply feature enough times, (iirc 3-4 times) it'll prompt you to make a thread and have those messages included iirc. 0: https://zulip.com/help/move-content-to-another-topic https://zulip.com/help/move-content-to-another-topic
- lowercased 3y agoThanks. Didn't see that in zulip, but haven't used it 'for real' beyond a few demos a couple years back. I don't remember getting prompted in discord like that; is that a setting someone needs to enable?
- nidnogg 3y agoLogo is seriously reminiscent of bootstrap [1] [1] https://getbootstrap.com/ https://getbootstrap.com/
- redder23 3y agoSomeone trying to sell some stupid proprietary crap that hardly has any innovation in it. We need people working on open source protocols and tools to make things like this possible with existing protocols and in a secure way, federated/decentralized. I saw in a comment below what I expected, it already exists LemmyBB!
- stanislavb 3y ago"Someone trying to sell some stupid proprietary crap that hardly has any innovation in it." you could be more helpful rather than leaving a stupid public crap comment that tries to offend someone that you don't know.
- replwoacause 3y agoI took delight in flagging this awful comment.
- lelanthran 3y ago> We need people working on open source protocols and tools to make things like this possible with existing protocols and in a secure way, federated/decentralized. Have you considered that some people don't see value in the decentralised/federated setup? They want to go to one site, that all there friends go to, without having to play guessing games to ensure that the server they are using is part of the federation that their friend is using. It's also bad form to call out something just because it is proprietary: Ever used AWS, Azure or GCP products? Why is their "proprietary crap" better than this "proprietary crap"
- Pi9h 3y agoBe kind.
- denysvitali 3y agoI'm a bit lost, even after trying the demo I can't understand why this should be better than, say, Discourse. Your implementation is probably not based on Ruby - which makes it more interesting - but it's not open source. In terms of features, they don't seem to compare at all as this is really early stage. The idea behind the project is good, and I think this is the future. I successfully pushed the company I work for to use internally a Discourse instance to overcome the same issues you faced - and it works. We now have an "internal StackOverflow" and an engaging community. It's not a new concept (see Google's YAQS), but it's a (IMHO) working one that many more companies should adopt as it really increases knowledge sharing and productivity! Best of luck with your project, I think you're on the right path but you should definitely start comparing this to Discourse and define why should anyone get this - and why must it be SaaS (some big companies are against SaaS for their stuff).
- Operyl 3y agoBest I can tell, it is indeed Ruby on Rails. > <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://delivery.booklet.group/rails/active_storage/representations/proxy/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBb3dDIiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--e12c37d428fc0d7eeb20fdde67e0ae72123c31cd/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdCem9MWm05eWJXRjBTU0lJY0c1bkJqb0dSVlE2RTNKbGMybDZaVjkwYjE5bWFXeHNXd2hwQWlBRGFRSWdBM3NHT2dsamNtOXdTU0lPWVhSMFpXNTBhVzl1QmpzR1ZBPT0iLCJleHAiOm51bGwsInB1ciI6InZhcmlhdGlvbiJ9fQ==--92e70f514bfc8ee11235d0d8cf6b26c7a717e4cd/icon.png https://delivery.booklet.group/rails/active_storage/represen...">
- denysvitali 3y agoWow, okay, then it has no advantage over Discourse as of now (:
- philip1209 3y agoOne difference is that you can set up a Booklet entirely for free, without a server or paid subscription! Also, it doesn't use Ember.js, which is another plus in my book.
- _nalply 3y agoDisclaimer: Discord-hater here. It seems that the core feature is the AI generated summary. This could be a paid plugin for the most important discussion platforms in the wild, for example: old-school PHP discussion boards, Discord, Slack, Twitter, Facebook and others. This plugin also could offer AI-augmented search or AI logging. The pro: people don't need to leave their platform to profit! Another idea: Discord seems to be controversial. Some people love it, some people hate it. Instead of a plugin offer a discussion back-end with two frontends, one behaving like Discord, the other like a traditional discussion board. Or do both. Whatever. One problem I see is missing focus. People might not understand what you do.
- philip1209 3y agoTo be clear, the summary is not AI-generated - at least, not yet. I talk in the demo about the 1% rule for users (1% post, 9% like/reply, and 90% just read). I envision each of these three as separate levels of engagement within Booklet: 1. Some users will post and create threads 2. Some users will read the summary email and never get deeper 3. Some users will see a thread in the summary email and get very engaged in that thread (for example, by commenting or following it) Based on my experience, chat does a good job of #1, a mediocre job of #2, and a terrible job of #3. Specifically - long-running threads lack discoverability or engagement in chat, so people can't modulate their engagement to the topics they care about. This is why I built discussions from the ground-up, rather than making some Slack plugin.
- llasse 3y agoChat has a lower level barrier to participate than a forum post (or even old schooler: a mailing list). Chat is More direct and faster paced, which has its positive and negative effects (engagement vs quality - I’d assume most people put more thought into a forum post or email than a simple chat message) So far I have only seen Reddit/HN style „forums“ to combine these aspects together successfully (although I don’t know if that also happens in slack and the likes).. Another option might be to filter out important discussions and elevate it on a certain (“BB or mailing list worthy”) level - that seems to be a challenge, that the threading function does not sufficiently solve (also, as users don’t always adher to the technical aspect of replying to a thread). It will be interesting how LLM/AI might solve some of these issues of organizing the knowledge that is generated in these different formats. That’s a task that so far seems to be too tedious to be done by humans, after all. A wiki generated by AI to certain discussions and topics? Summaries in the chat software to certain keywords/discussions and suggestions on further reading?
- philip1209 3y agoI wrote about this a bit in my launch post [1]: > In today’s chat-centric environment, there’s a skewed emphasis on the ease of posting. We rarely pause to consider the broader implication: for every message posted, it’s likely to be read 100 times by other people. Yet, we continue to post more and more low-value messages, because it’s easy to do so. > For the vast 99% majority who are on the receiving end, chat becomes a source of stress. Constant notifications require frequent context shifts. Unstructured discussions make it difficult to follow along. And, the lack of summaries means onlookers are left out of the loop. > Knowledge work becomes more productive when non-urgent communication gets shifted to an asynchronous format. Thoughtful, long-form communications promote deeper thinking and better decision-making. This insight led Amazon to ban PowerPoint in meetings, and instead require 6-page memos to be read silently at the start of meetings. Programmers have long recognized the efficiency of this approach in their work, utilizing batch processing to have computers efficiently handle repetitive tasks. We need to apply a batching approach to our communication. Getting the newsletter right, including relevance scoring and summarization, is a really fun opportunity. I am experimenting with some GPT approaches - it's quite really effective at summarization. [1] https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-booklet/ https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-booklet/
- Tree1993 3y agowhy not https://github.com/freedit-org/freedit https://github.com/freedit-org/freedit No JavaScript at all
- sideproject 3y ago[dead]