Linen: The Future of Community Chat
Linen is a revolutionary community chat tool designed to provide an alternative to closed platforms like Slack and Discord. It offers the benefits of real-time communication while incorporating the organizational advantages of traditional forums. With Linen, communities can enjoy a structured and searchable environment, ensuring that valuable information is easily accessible.
Philosophy
Modern communities heavily rely on chat applications for seamless collaboration and communication. While tools like Slack and Discord excel in providing fast real-time responses, they often become overwhelming and chaotic repositories of information. In the past, communities thrived in forums, which offered better structure and search-engine friendliness. At Linen, we believe in a hybrid model that combines the advantages of real-time chat with the organizational benefits of a forum.
Linen is committed to fostering better community interactions, and we provide our platform free of charge, ensuring unlimited message retention for all users. You can sign up and experience the Linen community at Linen.community.
For the Linen Cloud edition, visit linen.dev. Join our public community by following this link: linen.dev/s/linen.
Development Philosophy
At Linen, our development philosophy revolves around delivering the smallest functioning features that significantly enhance users' lives and then iterating upon them. We strive for continuous improvement and actively incorporate user feedback into our development process.
Core Features
Linen offers a range of powerful features that set it apart from traditional chat platforms. These features include:
1. Search Engine Friendly
Unlike most chat applications that heavily rely on JavaScript, Linen communities prioritize search engine friendliness. With over 50,000 pages indexed on Google and more than 10,000,000 search impressions, Linen ensures that your community's content is easily discoverable. We achieve this by providing a sitemap, conditionally rendering a static version of our pages for search engines, and implementing cursor-based pagination to maintain consistency.
2. Customer Support Tooling
Communities often become hubs for customer support, and Linen understands this dynamic. To streamline customer support processes, Linen incorporates a dedicated customer support tooling system. All threads have an open/close state, and we offer a feed that allows you to browse all open and closed conversations in one centralized location. This feature eliminates the need to worry about missed messages across different channels and conversations.
3. Async First Approach
Recognizing that chat environments can quickly become noisy, especially within large communities, Linen employs an "async first" approach. By providing a feed of conversations in which you actively participate, you can stay informed without the fear of missing important messages. Additionally, we have reimagined @mentions as async notifications. Instead of interruptive notifications, they appear in your feed as !mentions. If urgency is required, Linen offers the option to send a push notification with !mention.
4. Import Communities
Linen supports the seamless import of public conversations, attachments, emojis, and members from popular platforms like Slack and Discord. Transitioning to Linen has never been easier, ensuring a smooth migration process for your community.
5. Single Account Across Multiple Communities
Say goodbye to managing multiple emails and passwords for different communities. With Linen, you can join multiple communities using a single login, simplifying your community engagement and collaboration experience.
6. Private Communities
In addition to public communities, Linen offers support for private communities that require a password for access. This feature is ideal for internal team discussions or exclusive community spaces.
7. Thread and Message Management
Linen empowers users with the ability to efficiently manage threads and messages. You can easily drag and drop messages, merging them into a single thread. Furthermore, moving threads between channels is a simple process, enabling streamlined organization within your community.
8. Discord Forum Support
Linen synchronizes with Discord and enhances its search engine friendliness. This integration allows you to enjoy the benefits of Linen's structured community environment while leveraging the familiarity and features of Discord.
9. Private Channels
Linen offers private channels that are invite-only within your community. This feature allows you to create exclusive spaces for specific groups or purposes, ensuring privacy and control over communication.
10. Direct Messages
Engage in direct messages within your Linen community. Connect with individuals privately, fostering personalized and efficient communication channels.
Roadmap
Linen is continually evolving, and we have an exciting roadmap of future developments. Here are some of the upcoming features and improvements we have planned:
1. Github Integration
We understand that many open-source communities rely on GitHub issues to manage their projects. Linen aims to streamline this process by allowing you to tag conversations with specific GitHub issues. This integration will automatically post messages when tickets are closed or updated, keeping your community informed about the progress of relevant issues.
2. Improved Search Functionality
While our current search functionality utilizes full-text search with PostgreSQL, we are dedicated to further enhancing the search experience. We are considering hosting a separate search service to provide even more powerful and accurate search capabilities.
3. Desktop and Mobile Clients
To ensure a seamless user experience, we are actively developing desktop and mobile clients for Linen. These dedicated applications will provide push notifications for urgent messages, allowing you to stay connected and informed across multiple devices.
4. Botting and Automation
Linen aims to empower users with custom botting and automation capabilities. Soon, you will be able to build and add your own custom bots, further enhancing community interactions and automating routine tasks.
Feedback
Linen is currently in its early stages of development, and we highly value user feedback. Your insights and suggestions play a crucial role in shaping the future of Linen. We encourage you to share your thoughts, ideas, and concerns with us, helping us improve and tailor Linen to your needs.
Miscellaneous Features
In addition to the core features outlined above, Linen offers several supplementary features to enhance your community experience. These features include:
- Markdown message support
- Custom community branding
- Custom domain hosting for Cloud edition
- Attachments support
- Emoji support
Documentation
To help you navigate and utilize Linen effectively, we have divided our documentation into several sections. These sections cover various aspects of Linen's functionality, allowing you to make the most out of the platform. Here are some key sections:
Developer Docs
Desktop Client Releases
Stay up-to-date with the latest releases of Linen's desktop client by visiting our GitHub repository:
https://github.com/Linen-dev/desktop-client/releases
Join us on this exciting journey as we revolutionize the way communities interact and collaborate. Together, let's embrace the future of community chat with Linen!
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