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Browse Kotlin Slack conversations without joining Slack (kotlinlang.org)
12 points by cheeseblubber on July 12, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



I thought maybe it was something JetBrains made, as that strikes me as something they'd do, but no:

> Powered by Linen (https://www.linen.dev)

> Linen syncs all your threads in your public channels and threads to linen.dev/s/your_slack_workspace_name. This makes your Slack/Discord contents available for your community members without requiring a login.

It looks like it's opt-in (which I guess is to be expected) since this is 404: https://www.linen.dev/s/kubernetes


How does Linen.dev make money? This is a simple feature that Slack/Discord could launch any day.


Funded by YC right now.

> Linen is free to use and get setup but I offer a paid version (I am still figuring out the pricing model for it) where you can get the content redirected to your own subdomain where your domain gets all the SEO benefits.

From their launch. No concrete plans, seems like YC seems some possibility with "extracting information from private communities and making it public"..

https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/64247

I can see this being a $10/mo product run on a tiny EC2 box being used by 1000's of communities with minimal support and operational costs.

I doubt they need more than $500K to fund this, and I'm surprised they got that much for it as it is. But I guess folks get funded from PDF's so.. Seems like Linen.dev got lucky before the purse strings started getting tighter.


Agreed, this makes no sense. Slack and Discord could open up their public chats for indexing any day of the week, and forgo logins if they wished. It’s a monetisation strategy, not a technical limitation. As soon as Linen gets enough traction, they will be obsoleted.


Zulip supports this natively.




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