Show HN: Bema: Work messaging built for humans

(getbema.app)

14 points | by ben_d 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • perryraskin 10 minutes ago
    Derrick Reimer tried this a bunch of years ago with Level. In short, it didn’t work. But many of us understand the desire for something like this.

    His repo: https://github.com/derrickreimer/level

  • jon-wood 1 hour ago
    While I applaud the sentiment here how many people work for an organisation that would be ok giving full Slack access to something like this, especially given the complete lack of information on how that data is being processed beyond an incredibly vague mention of Cloudflare in the privacy policy?
    • skinfaxi 58 minutes ago
      While I am of the same mind, many orgs have no idea what people are connecting to what. You can hook up slack with an unofficial mcp using tokens taken from your web session and your IT department would be none the wiser.
  • CEOatMindfries 18 minutes ago
    I don't know how much people are still into social media stuffs to make it better. But people need something which can make the life easier, nowadays it's tough to involve in so many things.
  • solyin 47 minutes ago
    The no interruptions thing is neat but oh god, tags?

    Zulip's got the channel/topic thing right. You join the #engineering channel and then there's the "PostgreSQL migration" topic.

    Any new system has to not be shit at threads like slack is.

  • hmokiguess 49 minutes ago
    Signal to noise ratio is such a frustrating problem to solve.

    I really wish you succeed and I will take whoever claims that space if they manage to do it right, I am burnt out from all messaging apps and utterly dissatisfied with where things are.

    I wish we stayed on IRC, that was peak.

    • solyin 41 minutes ago
      No it wasn't. If you didn't have an irc bouncer there was no scrollback, mod abuse was rampant, netsplits were just a thing we accepted. It didn't work on mobile because they didn't exist back then. I'm not saying what we have today is any better, but let's not look at IRC with rose-tinted glasses and think it didn't have room to improve.
      • hmokiguess 40 minutes ago
        All that you're talking about are UX problems, had we stayed with the Protocol first and "bring your own client" I'm convinced life would have been better.

        Everything nowadays is a walled garden behind a PaaS

        • Jeep_ 22 minutes ago
          Yes, but the average worker nowadays doesn't seem tech literate enough to understand decentralized concepts. If you just look at how the (failed) migration from Twitter/X to Mastodon happened, it gave a great insight into the average person's understanding.
          • hmokiguess 14 minutes ago
            That's a fair point, though I think this is a different problem to solve
  • drcongo 1 hour ago
    It says "Connect with your current messaging provider" and then never mentions that ability again. What does that look like?

    Personally, I absolutely despise what Slack has become and would love to replace it, but I can't see anything about this app that might persuade me or my coworkers to install it.

    edit: Don't mean to sound harsh about what you've built, but that page is not selling the app for you!

    • ben_d 1 hour ago
      Thanks for the feedback! We support bidirectional message syncing with selected public channels in your Slack organization. You invite the app to public channels you want to sync and then we have a setup wizard to help you setup your organization in Bema. Can definitely make this more obvious in the marketing copy.
      • boxed 1 hour ago
        I don't see how this can work even in theory. The shape of the platform always gets deeply ingrained in the behavior and even semantics of the users using it. Having radically different UIs on top of existing systems that other users might or might not see the same is fraught.
    • xnorswap 1 hour ago
      > despise what Slack has become

      I'm genuinely struggling to understand how slack is much different now than 5 or more years ago. There's a handful of features that are easy to ignore, but the fundamental experience has barely changed in a decade.

      What is it about slack that you despise?

      • sgarland 57 minutes ago
        Same. It’s perhaps a little more bloated, but it’s nothing like what Discord has become, as a counter.
      • drcongo 22 minutes ago
        Oh, there could be a massive list here, but as tiny exemplar - try zooming in to see something in the corner of an image shared while you're on a video call. You could, before they invented "Huddles", an even shittier version of the video calls feature it had before, but now you can't.

        I guess you also haven't been hit yet by the "every message is a new message even if I'm the one that just sent it and it's right there on screen in the channel I still have open because I sent it" bug yet. When you do, I'm afraid the only fix is to individually sign out of every Slack you're in, delete the app, delete every file it's ever created in ~/Library/, reinstall the app, re-sign-in to every Slack again.

  • RevenueOperator 1 hour ago
    [flagged]