Linen – Open-source Slack for communities
Hi HN, My name is Kam. I'm the founder of Linen.dev. Linen communities is a Slack/Discord alternative that is Google-searchable and customer-support friendly. Today we are open-sourcing Linen and launching Linen communities. You can now create a community on Linen.dev without syncing it from Slack and Discord! I initially launched Linen as a tool to sync Slack and Discord conversations to a search engine-friendly website. As I talked to more community managers, I quickly realized that Slack and Discord communities don't scale well and that there needs to be a better tool, especially for…
Linen – Open-source Slack for communities launched on October 18, 2022 with 292 votes, #65 of 3,153 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.
In plain words
Linen is an open-source community platform that functions as an alternative to Slack and Discord. It enables communities to create searchable, Google-indexed conversations designed for customer support and knowledge sharing. Built for community managers seeking better scalability than traditional chat platforms, Linen combines the modern feel of chat with the organizational advantages of forums, making community discussions discoverable and accessible to external audiences.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Lightweight Google-searchable Slack alternative for Communities - Linen-dev/linen.dev
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, My name is Kam. I'm the founder of Linen.dev. Linen communities is a Slack/Discord alternative that is Google-searchable and customer-support friendly. Today we are open-sourcing Linen and launching Linen communities. You can now create a community on Linen.dev without syncing it from Slack and Discord! I…
Does a similar job
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- LMLinen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable2022 · ▲177
Hi HN! Kam here. I’m the founder of Linen.dev https://linen.dev, a website that makes your public Slack community Google searchable. Linen will sync your Slack threads and make it SEO friendly so your community can find Slack content that was previously hidden. Previously I worked on a popular open source project which had a sizable Slack community. Slack was great for engaging with community members and with early sales. However as community scales Slack becomes this black hole where context becomes lost. Most public communities can’t afford to pay for several…
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