Show HN: Bema: Work messaging built for humans

Posted by ben_d 3 days ago

Hi HN! I'm Ben, the founder of Bema. I've been frustrated with the current state of work messaging software for a while now, and I've heard similar complaints from friends and coworkers. (Too many channels, easy to lose things, distracted from actual work.) I set out to build a platform that would encourage asynchronous communication with an option to break glass if needed. Here's the result, let me know what you think.

Comments

Comment by gobwas 4 hours ago

Congrats on launch (if it is it actually). It reminds me of https://pace.dev, which was the same lovely idea which, however, I haven't heard of much after it was acquired. Have you compared your product with similar products and why yours is better? :) Thanks!

Comment by jon-wood 3 days 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?

Comment by skinfaxi 3 days 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.

Comment by perryraskin 3 days 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

Comment by ben_d 3 days ago

Thanks for linking this; just read through his post-mortem. Lot's of good stuff there to mull over, especially his bit about low customer motivation to actually seek out/engage with Slack alternatives. It's a challenge, and it's been one of the top things on my mind since approaching MVP. I've been working to make the transition from Slack as easy as possible, but that's obviously just one hurdle of many in this area.

Comment by solyin 3 days 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.

Comment by drcongo 3 days 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!

Comment by ben_d 3 days 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.

Comment by boxed 3 days 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.

Comment by xnorswap 3 days 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?

Comment by drcongo 3 days 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.

Comment by sgarland 3 days ago

Same. It’s perhaps a little more bloated, but it’s nothing like what Discord has become, as a counter.

Comment by CEOatMindfries 3 days 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.

Comment by hmokiguess 3 days 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.

Comment by solyin 3 days 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.

Comment by hmokiguess 3 days 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

Comment by Jeep_ 3 days 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.

Comment by cik 3 days ago

Whilst it's technically interesting, I'd argue that users don't have to care. Technical, or advanced users can twist whatever dials we nat want to twist. But grandma, my father, my buddy the data scientist they don't care.

Single company control, spofs, none of this means anything to them. Click the button ans itnworls, and quickly does. Returning to simple while maintaining usability, usefulness, speed, turnkey.. that has value to the majority of users.

Comment by hmokiguess 3 days ago

That's a fair point, though I think this is a different problem to solve

Comment by trog 2 days ago

We just ran our own company server, which got rid of the mod abuse and netsplit problems completely. Every client we used had logs so scrollback wasn't an issue, though a few people used bouncers for the scrollback feature if they didn't like to look at logs - but having a plaintext log was invaluable to simply grep for old conversations, instead of having to use a slow painful UI to search.

I'd go back to IRC in a heartbeat. The one thing I'd miss is inline image viewing but I could survive without that!

Comment by dustfinger 3 days ago

There are still lots of projects using IRC by the way. It is light weight and simple. Checkout https://libera.chat/.