[mrjn]

Founder here. Jason (OP) and I think about this a lot. The balance of cluttering everyone's names on the left panel, v/s making it feel like you're in the same room as these people.

If you look at feed based platforms, they tend to get very asynchronous (almost forum like). And so our design for the real-timeness of the feed was to emphasize the fact that you're in this room with these people, and they're talking right now. It's really fun when a new thread pops up, or a new chat emerges in the feed. That is exciting.

I think perhaps it would help to show a list of online people, so you feel like starting a conversation. Or, perhaps, just seeing other people participate would help. There's surely room to optimize to get the conversations going.

[n42]

yeah, you've hit it on the head – I think what I felt was missing in the demo was a feeling of presence. a hard thing to capture. anyways, awesome job and good luck!

[mrjn]

Thanks! We'll be brainstorming ways of making user presence felt, while keeping it clean.

[goodmachine]

+1 for human presence. I agree with the commenter upthread that it feels off-puttingly impersonal. Show me the faces!

Otherwise, I totally get the problem you're trying to solve so I poked it and quite liked it.

As someone with 2091 years worth of Slack convos (and Slack wanting me to upgrade to export them) can you let me know how you handle imports and exports?

[mrjn]

You can install the Struct bot in Slack: https://struct.ai/install-slack -- This would by default pick up the last 3 months of conversations (we do this to decrease the unpaid load on GPT). You can ping us and we can help sync it from the beginning of whatever history Slack shows.

We don't have an exporter yet, but can surely put one together which provides a SQL / CSV formatted output (or whatever works best for users). We would never charge for exports.