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Linen – Make your Discord community Google-searchable

by reichertjalex on 5/24/22, 5:19 PM with 29 comments

by Klonoar on 5/24/22, 7:24 PM
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?
by gtramont on 5/24/22, 7:18 PM
> 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.
by james-redwood on 5/24/22, 7:10 PM
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.
by dang on 5/24/22, 8:52 PM
Related:
Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168882 - April 2022 (57 comments)
by elitan on 5/24/22, 7:16 PM
This looks very useful, but is it allowed according to Discord's ToS?
by byuu on 5/24/22, 6:26 PM
I wonder if this works with actual messages as well as threads in Discord, would be interesting when searching for information.
by dylanjcastillo on 5/24/22, 7:12 PM
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.
by tedyoung on 5/24/22, 8:19 PM
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.
by rmason on 5/24/22, 7:06 PM
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.
by schnebbau on 5/24/22, 8:37 PM
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?
by politelemon on 5/24/22, 9:07 PM
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.
by fdgsdfogijq on 5/24/22, 7:26 PM
Literally had this idea the other day