[HN Gopher] Show HN: Booklet - Async forums as an alternative to...
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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!
Author : philip1209
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-09-20 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.booklet.group)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.booklet.group)
| tbird24 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Definitely rooting for this to take off.
| srsqsonyl wrote:
| This take feels like twee projection of anecdata.
|
| There are thousands of forums that require sign up just to read
| posts. Always has been.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Agreed. 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 wrote:
| I 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?
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| They 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.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Those 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.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| If Discord hijacked all the communities, wouldn't elixirforum
| not exist? Seems like a contradiction...
| kykeonaut wrote:
| I am very sure they weren't speaking literally...
| hinkley wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Do 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 wrote:
| That could work nicely, yes.
| hinkley wrote:
| We 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.
| neilv wrote:
| > _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. :)
| mrd3v0 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| Absolutely. 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/
| philip1209 wrote:
| Thank 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/
| qingcharles wrote:
| Be 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?
| sakopov wrote:
| Absolutely. We've made a full circle and I'm very happy that
| products like this are becoming a thing again.
| AhmadIbrahim wrote:
| I 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
| philomath_mn wrote:
| I 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
| charles_f wrote:
| This 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.
| smallerfish wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Yes, communities can be public - check out
| 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
|
| I also tried making a little video demo + walkthrough of the
| product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf03XsD4pvo
| mdaniel wrote:
| clicking 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/p4x0bznob52y...
| philip1209 wrote:
| Thanks 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, 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| If you're allowing image uploads, always make sure it is
| an image being uploaded. I rooted a very big webhost back
| in the day by uploading a script as a PFP.
|
| Funnily enough, I found their root password eventually in
| a config file. It was "internet" :|
| urza wrote:
| If I can't self host it and own the data, I am not interested.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Self-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.
| craftkiller wrote:
| The two aren't mutually exclusive. It is a common
| monetization strategy for open source projects to offer a
| paid hosted option in addition to free self-hosting. For
| example, you can self-host Matrix (synapse, dendrite, and
| conduit) but you can also pay the creators of Matrix to host
| it for you[1].
|
| [1] https://element.io/pricing
| philip1209 wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair - Discourse is a different forum software
| that follows this playbook.
|
| The lack of a unified backend makes it much harder to build
| native mobile apps.
| mdekkers wrote:
| > The lack of a unified backend makes it much harder to
| build native mobile apps.
|
| That response comes across as disingenuous. The lack of a
| unified backend makes a lot of monetisation models hard,
| but should pose zero problems for native mobile apps.
| Point at an API and done.
| omgmajk wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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.
| [deleted]
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| https://demo.booklet.group
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| To 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.
| [deleted]
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Email had the tree view decades before HN existed. If your
| email client doesn't show you that, find a better email client.
| gdprrrr wrote:
| If only other people would care to respond to the correct
| mail insgead of the latest
| u801e wrote:
| It's not that people don't care; it's the client they use
| that basically have them reply to the l most recent message
| regardless.
|
| I blame conversation view.
| mbreese wrote:
| Want 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
| u801e wrote:
| What 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.
| turtlebits wrote:
| I 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]
| butz wrote:
| Checked out demo @ https://demo.booklet.group , cannot see
| scrollbar on Firefox. Weird.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Nor on Chrome.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| not on Safari either. Maybe an intentional choice?
| omarfarooq wrote:
| How much control of the design we get?
| philip1209 wrote:
| It'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!
| Gys wrote:
| Love the design
| [deleted]
| CountGeek wrote:
| Not sure yet how this compares to Flarum -
| https://freeflarum.com/ you can self-host too https://flarum.org/
| [deleted]
| douglaswlance wrote:
| How are forums not just a different style of chat room where
| anyone can make a new room?
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| History
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Why would someone use this over something like Lemmy? Are there
| any plans for self hosting?
| [deleted]
| joemi wrote:
| From 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."
| Sirikon wrote:
| Aren't async forums just forums
| cammil wrote:
| No. They are special.
|
| I'm being facetious. Take note all ye.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-09-20 23:00 UTC)