Hi Product hunt!

My name is Kam. I'm the founder of Linen.dev. Today we are open-sourcing Linen and launching Linen communities. Linen communities is a Slack/Discord alternative that is Google-searchable and customer-support friendly. You can now create a community on Linen.dev without syncing it from Slack and Discord!

Linen.dev was originally a tool to sync Slack and Discord conversations to a search engine-friendly website. After 6 months of Linen, we've gotten over 50,000 pages indexed by Google and over 200,000 Google search impressions amongst our communities. We want to improve the experience of managing knowledge/product communities. Traditional communities have lived on forums that scale much better regarding community support and async conversations. But in recent years, more and more communities are ending up in Slack and Discord, which is a poor experience for community support. We believe the chat experience is here to stay because it is a friendlier and lower barrier to friction, but we want to introduce all the benefits of a forum while having all the benefits of real-time chat.

Most large communities become a support channel, and managing this many conversations is not what Slack and Discord are designed for. I've seen community admins hack together their custom syncing scripts and internal tools to stay on top of the conversations. This is why we created a feed view, a single view for all the threads in all the channels you care about. We added an open and closed state to every thread so you can track them similarly to GitHub issues or a ticketing system. This way, you and your team won't miss messages and let them drop. We also allow you to filter conversations you are @mentioned as a way of assigning tickets.

Finally, how chat is designed today is inherently interrupt-driven and disrupts your team's flow state. Most of the time, when I am @mentioning a team member, I actually don't need them to respond immediately. But I do want to make sure that they do eventually see it. This is why we want to redesign how the notification system works. We are repurposing @mentions to show up in your feed and your conversation sections and adding a !mention. A @mention will appear in your feed but doesn't send any push notifications, whereas a !mention will send a notification for when things need a real-time synchronous conversation. This lets you separate casual conversations from urgent conversations. When everything is urgent, nothing is. This, along with the feed, you can get a very forum-like experience to browse the conversations.

Linen is free to use for communities. We offer a paid hosted version where you can host Linen under your domain and get all the SEO benefits of having a large set of long tail keywords. We also offer a paid private version of Linen for private communities and teams.

https://github.com/linen-dev/lin...

You can join our community at http://linen.dev/s/linen see what the experience is like.