Linen
Lightweight, Google-searchable open source Slack and Discord alternative designed for online communities.
Linen is an open source community chat platform that positions itself as a lightweight, SEO-friendly alternative to Slack and Discord. It is designed for communities that want their conversations indexed by search engines and discoverable by new members, while still offering a familiar chat experience.
Linen ships with channels, threads, direct messages, reactions, and integrations with GitHub, and renders every conversation on the public web as well-structured, indexable URLs. This makes it an attractive choice for open source projects, developer communities, and public product support forums.
The project is released under AGPL-3.0 and is built as a TypeScript application. It can be self-hosted via Docker, with optional paid cloud and enterprise plans for communities that prefer a managed service.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Linen?
Linen is an open source, lightweight community platform that syncs your Slack or Discord conversations onto a searchable, SEO-friendly website. It's designed for online communities and support groups that want their discussions indexed by Google and LLMs instead of being locked inside a private chat app.
How does Linen differ from Discord?
Discord is a real-time chat tool where conversations are hard to search and invisible to search engines. Linen takes a different approach: it only syncs your public channels to a public, SEO-optimized website, so community content becomes discoverable on Google, reduces repeat questions, and can be viewed without a login.
Does Linen replace Discord or work alongside it?
Linen works alongside your existing Slack or Discord community. It syncs threads from your public channels in real time to a searchable website — you keep chatting in Discord, and Linen handles the public, indexable archive of those conversations.
Can I self-host Linen?
Yes. Linen is open source and self-hostable. This lets you own your data, keep your community content on your own domain, and get the SEO benefits without relying on a third-party service. There is also a hosted version with paid tiers that add custom domains and advanced branding.
Is Linen privacy-friendly?
Linen only syncs conversations from public channels. It stores only display names and profile pictures — it does not collect email addresses or private member information. It also offers an option to anonymize member display names, and it will delete a member's information and messages on request.
Repository details
Updated 8/6/2026, 3:00:33 PM
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