<story><title>Braid – A team-chat app with a novel UI for better conversations</title><url>https://github.com/braidchat/braid</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rafd</author><text>Hey HN! One of the creators of Braid here.&lt;p&gt;We started Braid internally in the pre-Slack days (we were using HipChat then), because we felt that &amp;quot;chatrooms&amp;quot; didn&amp;#x27;t promote good async team workflows. They would lead to a lot of FOMO and constant checking, because if you didn&amp;#x27;t participate in a conversation at the right time, the topic in a channel would have moved on to something else. We liked the async nature of email more, but, email has it&amp;#x27;s own baggage.&lt;p&gt;Our team has been using Braid internally for several years and we&amp;#x27;re very happy with it. But, compared to Slack, it&amp;#x27;s best thought of as a prototype &amp;#x2F; experiment &amp;#x2F; UI-proof-of-concept, because we don&amp;#x27;t have the polish and maturity of features that Slack has.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve had interest from some individuals who &amp;quot;get it&amp;quot;, but it&amp;#x27;s often been hard for those individuals to convert the rest of their teams. If any team here is interested in the Braid concept and wants to give it a serious go, I&amp;#x27;m at your disposal, and I&amp;#x27;d love to get your feedback so we can keep morphing the product.&lt;p&gt;The use of &amp;quot;hashtags&amp;quot; in our demos is a bit overdone compared to what happens in practice. It makes it seem like twitter #hastags, but, it&amp;#x27;s really more like Gmail labels. Braid tags serve the same purpose as Slack&amp;#x27;s channels, except a given thread can exist in multiple channels (ie. go to multiple teams &amp;#x2F; individuals) and tags can be added over time (ie. more people can be invited to the conversation).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssivark</author><text>In essence, this moving conversations from a “category” ontology (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) to a “tags” ontology. In a sense this is rediscovering email&amp;#x2F;list addresses with cc ;-)&lt;p&gt;One can set up “tag subscriptions” (propagating hooks) for tags, such that at the lowest level, the messages you see are all the messages you’ve been tagged in. This can even be made declarative, so adding&amp;#x2F;removing tags can re-jig who will see which conversations.&lt;p&gt;There is an obvious niceness to this approach :-) What would you say are the problems&amp;#x2F;challenges with this modeling of the domain?</text></comment>
<story><title>Braid – A team-chat app with a novel UI for better conversations</title><url>https://github.com/braidchat/braid</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rafd</author><text>Hey HN! One of the creators of Braid here.&lt;p&gt;We started Braid internally in the pre-Slack days (we were using HipChat then), because we felt that &amp;quot;chatrooms&amp;quot; didn&amp;#x27;t promote good async team workflows. They would lead to a lot of FOMO and constant checking, because if you didn&amp;#x27;t participate in a conversation at the right time, the topic in a channel would have moved on to something else. We liked the async nature of email more, but, email has it&amp;#x27;s own baggage.&lt;p&gt;Our team has been using Braid internally for several years and we&amp;#x27;re very happy with it. But, compared to Slack, it&amp;#x27;s best thought of as a prototype &amp;#x2F; experiment &amp;#x2F; UI-proof-of-concept, because we don&amp;#x27;t have the polish and maturity of features that Slack has.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve had interest from some individuals who &amp;quot;get it&amp;quot;, but it&amp;#x27;s often been hard for those individuals to convert the rest of their teams. If any team here is interested in the Braid concept and wants to give it a serious go, I&amp;#x27;m at your disposal, and I&amp;#x27;d love to get your feedback so we can keep morphing the product.&lt;p&gt;The use of &amp;quot;hashtags&amp;quot; in our demos is a bit overdone compared to what happens in practice. It makes it seem like twitter #hastags, but, it&amp;#x27;s really more like Gmail labels. Braid tags serve the same purpose as Slack&amp;#x27;s channels, except a given thread can exist in multiple channels (ie. go to multiple teams &amp;#x2F; individuals) and tags can be added over time (ie. more people can be invited to the conversation).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rakoo</author><text>Very nice to see some innovation in this space, I wish there were more novelties like this !&lt;p&gt;Like someone said in the thread, I know that Zulip has a similar system (although I&amp;#x27;ve never used it): you have predefined &amp;quot;rooms&amp;quot;, and inside each &amp;quot;room&amp;quot; you can start a new thread, with its own topic, much like a new email thread. From what I can see the home view can directly show all snippets from all conversations directly, without having to jump from room to room. Also, since you&amp;#x27;re not interested in _all_ the discussions in the room, you can only follow some. I guess it&amp;#x27;s the same for Braid ?&lt;p&gt;Speaking of similarities, Google Chat (the one for GSuite accounts) still has a similar model: you have rooms, and in each rooms you must create (unnamed) threads and you can chooses which one to follow (and be notified for). Unfortunately the UI is not very well done, all threads are stacked vertically so you can&amp;#x27;t switch from one to the other easily and a lot of screen estate is lost. I think this is where Braid might do things better.&lt;p&gt;One thing that Braid does is it essentially hides all the conversations you&amp;#x27;re not interested in. However sometimes I had to search for something I didn&amp;#x27;t really remember, and I only could find it because I had a rough idea about what appeared before or after, or the time it was said. Is there a way to do the same with Braid ?&lt;p&gt;Lastly, thank you for making this open source, it&amp;#x27;s rare enough that it needs to be underlined. Oh and I see matrix integration is on the roadmap ? Would that mean that Braid would essentially become a glorified matrix client ? I don&amp;#x27;t mean to sound negative, I&amp;#x27;d really wish to try it but I can&amp;#x27;t use it if I have no one to talk to, so I&amp;#x27;m gonna follow Braid closely in the future.</text></comment>