[HN Gopher] Linen - Make your Discord community Google-searchable
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Linen - Make your Discord community Google-searchable
Author : areichert
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-05-24 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.linen.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.linen.dev)
| Klonoar wrote:
| Damn, I had this idea in my list for the past few months! Kicking
| myself for not moving on it sooner.
|
| Congrats to the team, looks well done! It's a _bit_ absurd that
| it 's come to this but I guess that's where we're at now.
|
| One question I had in my "to figure out" list was: how do you
| handle making users messages public, when they _feel_ like they
| 're joining something private?
|
| Another question: do you sync deletions if a user goes back after
| e.g 1/3/6 months and deletes a message?
| cheeseblubber wrote:
| For Slack we're making all threads private and we follow update
| and deletion immediately.
|
| For Discord we follow deletion after a day since we are doing a
| nightly sync for the time being.
|
| Privacy is one of our main priorities since I get that we're
| taking something that felt private into something that will be
| persisted on the internet. Here is a few ways we are/planning
| on addressing this:
|
| * We only store profile image, user id and display name for the
| user so we don't keep email or personal identifiable
| information
|
| * We just shipped a new feature where we can anonymize the
| display name so it is even less identifiable - i.e. with names
| like `many-ancient-parrot`, `adventurous-billowy-kangaroo`, and
| `benedict-cumberbatch`.
|
| * Right now we sync everything but very soon we are shipping
| features where communities can only sync from the new
| conversations.
|
| * Upon request we delete all the users's messages and
| conversations based on the user ID. We're shipping new where
| the community admin can delete conversations themselves in the
| coming weeks.
|
| * We allow community admins to decide which channels to show or
| hide since some communities choose to create new channels so it
| is clear that the conversations going forward here are public.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Do you anonymize _only_ the display name? If you do that, you
| should probably sub in a generic avatar or something.
|
| I use my personal photo on Discord communities I'm involved
| in, so you could randomize the name but it'd still be obvious
| it's me.
| cheeseblubber wrote:
| Now that you mention it seems obvious that should be a
| feature. I'll add it to the roadmap. Probably will be done
| in the next two weeks.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Literally had this idea the other day
| rmason wrote:
| The CFML Slack had a member in SF meet with the Linen team. The
| Linen team moves very fast and within hours they had our Slack
| indexed. I've used their search and I cannot say enough good
| things about them.
| Artistry121 wrote:
| schnebbau wrote:
| Very cool but this feels like something that it will be cloned as
| an open-source alternative soon enough (a la Firebase ->
| Supabase).
|
| Do you have any plans to do it yourself?
| cheeseblubber wrote:
| I actually built Linen because my previous project was a fairly
| popular open source project. I actually don't think the hard
| part of this product is the technical part(like most startups).
| I have considered building this as open source and might still
| do it a bit later. But for the time being I want to focus on
| revenue since funding environment has changed quite a bit in
| the past month.
| politelemon wrote:
| It's sad that Gitter didn't gain the traction in tech communities
| that it should have. It's already searchable (and you land on the
| conversation directly, not a cloned website), clutter-free and
| supported markdown before the others. But many communities simply
| chose to walk into closed spaces, now these workarounds are being
| built.
| heretogetout wrote:
| Is it possible to search Gitter archives? It's real easy in
| Discord but I don't see a way to do it in Gitter, at least not
| without third party interfaces (I haven't tested if they work).
| jakecopp wrote:
| If they start supporting Matrix this should be possible!
|
| It would be awesome if they supported Matrix - you could then
| archive many things via a bridge
| (https://matrix.org/bridges/).
| nightpool wrote:
| I used Gitter for a small open-source community for several
| years, but we moved to Discord just because it substantially
| reduced friction for non-technical user support. Not
| necessarily the biggest issue for many software projects, but
| for user-facing projects it was impossible to get people to
| sign up for Github accounts and connect to Gitter just to ask
| us a question. Discord has super-low-friction onboarding that
| really makes it easier for people to give feedback and
| troubleshoot issues.
| byuu wrote:
| I wonder if this works with actual messages as well as threads in
| Discord, would be interesting when searching for information.
| james-redwood wrote:
| I love this solution for a number of reasons:
|
| 1. I find the posting experience on Discord far more seamless
| than that on a typical forum. From navigating channels to posting
| messages, I prefer the quicker navigation and viewing that it
| provides.
|
| 2. Discord servers tend to be more active than forums.
|
| 3. It fixes the gap between loads of pre-existing communities
| that would have been difficult to migrate over to a forum and
| document any sort of solutions that they provide in a searchable
| manner, something that even within Discord was rather difficult
| to accomplish.
|
| 4. You can also access loads of 'forums' now with a single
| account (you only need one Discord account in order to do so). A
| password manager makes this trivial, but the advantage that
| Discord has is being able to navigate seamlessly between many
| different servers or 'forums'.
|
| 5. I assume that it would be easier to document whatever gets put
| onto Linen than it would be to document Discord servers, but I'm
| not entirely sure whether this is truly the case.
| dylanjcastillo wrote:
| I tried searching for some exact phrases from the live demo, but
| didn't get any results in Google.
|
| Maybe Google isn't crawling all the pages on the site? Possibly
| related to being an SPA?
|
| Otherwise, I think this is a pretty cool project. I've always
| thought that Slack and Discord communities lack a good way to
| find them.
| cheeseblubber wrote:
| Try these queries:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=replace+beast+http+with+prox...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=seeing+a+weird+issue+with+fl...
|
| We built Linen on Nextjs since I wanted to server render all
| the content so it performs better for crawlers. But getting
| Google to crawl a large number of pages is tricky. It takes a
| while and even with a submitted sitemap Google sure takes their
| time.
|
| Depending on the community after a month or two you end up
| seeing a few hundred pages being index by Google. Their ranking
| will vary based on how relevant the content is or based on some
| Google magic. Since I render the content that is newest on
| Linen it probably won't be on Google for a while.
| tedyoung wrote:
| What's the catch? It's currently free, but given that it's VC-
| backed, somewhere there's gotta be money made. Ads? Selling my
| community members' data?
|
| And I also have questions about syncing: message deletions,
| channels changed from public-to-private, etc.
| cheeseblubber wrote:
| We have two pricing tiers:
|
| * A free one that is hosted on Linen.dev/s/communityName i.e
| https://www.linen.dev/s/cfml
|
| * A paid tier where it is hosted on the customer's domain ie.
| https://archive.pulumi.com https://linen.prefect.io
| https://community.supertokens.com
|
| Most of our communities are on our paid tier where they get the
| content hosted on their domain and get their own custom
| branding. The main benefit being they get the SEO benefits of
| having a bunch of organic long tail keywords for their domain.
|
| I am still figuring pricing out but I'm testing out volume
| based/community size based pricing.
|
| I elaborated a bit more on how we handle privacy in another
| comment. Happy to address any other questions
| elitan wrote:
| This looks very useful, but is it allowed according to Discord's
| ToS?
| altairprime wrote:
| No, it's not, unless every participant individually and
| permanently grants a license to their content for this use
| _before_ they're permitted to speak in any channel that's being
| archived by this integration.
| teraflop wrote:
| Discord's developer TOS says that API users must "comply with
| all applicable privacy laws and regulations" and adhere to a
| privacy policy. It doesn't otherwise put any specific
| restrictions on what that policy can look like. It certainly
| doesn't say you can only use user content if the user
| "individually and permanently grants a license".
|
| If you think that Linen would be violating the _user 's_
| rights, as opposed to Discord's, then that's a separate
| issue, and one that would probably come to a question of fair
| use and/or implied license.
|
| Out of curiosity, do you also think public mailing list
| archives are (or should be) forbidden, by the same reasoning?
| _ink_ wrote:
| What is the difference vs posting, let's say, to HN?
| gtramont wrote:
| > Make Slack and Discord communities Google-searchable
|
| Isn't Slack an acronym for "Searchable Log of All Communication
| and Knowledge"?! Then they either failed miserably at making it
| searchable to the point of requiring an entire new business to
| make it so, or I'm not seeing the point of Linen.
| 1986 wrote:
| There's a distinction between searching for info within a Slack
| community (Slack handles this well) and searching _from the
| outside_ for info that only lives within a Slack community. As
| more and more communities that used to live on public forums
| migrate to Discord or Slack, that knowledge is basically
| impossible to find from the outside (Google) if you're not
| already a member of the Discord or Slack instance. From what I
| understand, it's this latter use case that Linen is targeting.
| gtramont wrote:
| "Slack handles this well" That's questionable... ':) --
| Though I get it now. And that's indeed a need! Reminds me of
| when we needed to setup IRC bouncers to not lose history.
| Thanks.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Show HN: Linen - Make your Slack community Google-searchable_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168882 - April 2022 (57
| comments)
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