Intro

My name is Kam, and I’m the founder of Linen. Linen started with the goal of making Slack/Discord communities Google-searchable. In the past few months we launched our own platform and desktop client. Today, we are deleting our landing page with a feed of interesting threads/conversations from your community. Browse it here! I founded Linen because I noticed so many amazing communities hidden behind walled gardens. Valuable conversations that used to happen in traditional forums were now being obscured. Consequently, more people joined Slack and Discord channels, asking questions that had been answered before. With Linen, we aim to reverse this trend and bring technical communities back into the public eye. Since our launch, we have grown to over 200k monthly visitors within one year, with over 1,000 Slack/Discord/Linen communities. As Linen expanded, we discovered a wealth of insightful content that deserved a spotlight. Instead of wasting precious real-estate on a traditional salesy landing page, we now showcase interesting content that would have otherwise remained hidden forever. Today, we are launching our Linen feed to bring threads together from across communities. How does it work: Any public community on Linen, whether synced with Slack/Discord or native, has a chance of having their conversations showcased on the front page. Since many of these communities are chat-based, we use simple heuristics like thread length and the number of users interacting with the messages to select interesting conversations. Additionally, we will highlight new community creations on the home page of Linen. We plan to implement a ranking algorithm based on upvotes/downvotes in the future. For the first version, we will heavily moderate the content to prevent it from devolving into internet wildness. We are still unsure which algorithm is best suited for our use case, so we anticipate a lot of experimentation and learning. Once you click into a thread, you will land on the thread page of the conversation. There, you can see who else is viewing the thread and engage in real-time discussions with like-minded people. What's next: Beyond a global feed, we aim to introduce the concept of a personal feed. Currently, when someone joins a large chat-based community, it becomes too chaotic, leading them to mute the entire community which defeats the purpose of joining a community. We want to provide the ability to create a personalized feed of conversations across multiple communities and types, including Linen/Slack/Discord/Lemmy/Mastadon. This way, you can stay updated and engage with the conversations in one single place. If this interests you, please give a thumbs-up to this GitHub issue: [Link to GitHub Issue](https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev/issues/1419).