Sure thing. Mattermost and most open source chat tools not Google searchable. They can offer public communities but unless they are rendering static version of the site it is really not SEO friendly. They are very enterprise/security focused so if you want something secure and private Mattermost is fantastic.
We started out making Slack and Discord Google searchable and search engine friendly see: kotlin for example https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ they have around 50,000 pages indexed by Google. We render a static version for Google while giving you the real time experience of a chat app.
Secondly most large communities end up being a community support channel. So for anyone with customer support experience having your conversation in one place is really crucial as well as some sort of open close state. I was also the author for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups which made me a bit opinionated in terms of community/customer support
Finally most communities end up being too noisy and in part is because it is designed for chat. I actually don't think there is a great solution out there to manage conversations at a large scale and we think we can innovate on the UX of it.
What are your thoughts on Zulip? Their priorities and yours seem to align. I see you have threads but they look more like Discord threads rather than how Zulip does them.
I'm not an expert on Zulip by any means but I'm always a fan of other open source projects.
Beyond what we have right now, we want to design Linen to be a thread-first tool (hence the name). We wanted an experience familiar to users of chat communities but encourages thread usage natively. We want to do things like letting you move messages between threads and threads between channel. Which I think Zulip has that functionality. We just haven't had the chance yet because the scope is so big and we wanted to ship something quick and get early feedback.
Would also love to hear about what you really enjoy about Zulip.
The difference between Zulip's implementation and Linen is that you don't need a separate UI when someone finds a link in Google. If you find a link through Google you get a dynamic real time experience instead of a static page.
If you google site:rust-lang.zulipchat.com you won't see any results. If you do the same with site:slack-chats.kotlinlang.org you'll see at least 20,000 results
Having these communities google searchable is actually a really cool feature. I don't understand why companies create "open" communities (that are mostly dead anyway) and everything talked about in there is not indexed at all.
That is horrible for the actual users, even more so if you go with the free Slack option which only gives you access to 90 days of messaging history. How can you find discussions about specific topics if it's not really searchable.
Managing conversation at large scale has been done. Remember "old" forums/bulletin boards that were really popular in the early 2000's? They actually were communities, even though some were rather toxic. They were searchable. Discussions happened naturally.
We started out making Slack and Discord Google searchable and search engine friendly see: kotlin for example https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ they have around 50,000 pages indexed by Google. We render a static version for Google while giving you the real time experience of a chat app.
Secondly most large communities end up being a community support channel. So for anyone with customer support experience having your conversation in one place is really crucial as well as some sort of open close state. I was also the author for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups which made me a bit opinionated in terms of community/customer support
Finally most communities end up being too noisy and in part is because it is designed for chat. I actually don't think there is a great solution out there to manage conversations at a large scale and we think we can innovate on the UX of it.