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Comment by it33 | Hacker News Reader

Mattermost CEO here. In my mind Slack’s target persona is no longer an engineer (if it ever was) - It is more likely a less tech savvy person who wants a WYSIWYG editor for rich text inputs.

For what it’s worth, Mattermost is an open source alternative built for engineers by engineers. The interface is markdown.

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Been using a self hosted version of Mattermost for our students as a main form of communication and the markdown support is something I absolutely love. Thanks.

Hey, have there ever been discussions about a making a truly native client? not a web wrapper?

imo a fast native client, that doesn't look like a sad slack clone (which teams currently does) would put you streets ahead of the entire field.

I know it means increasing code complexity.

but by golly would it be nice to have a truly nice client.

Yes, there's an on-going discussion about going to native clients. One path is React Native going desktop, similar to how we've done our iOS and Android apps. We should probably do something about encouraging some early prototyping.

Highly appreciate the feedback,

There’s a lot of speed you can muster out of the different platforms the closer you are to the metal. That said, I would love to help out if it’s an open source project. There are some developments at least on the iOS side, like SwiftUI, that could make writing and maintaining these native apps easier than you may be thinking.

At my current job everybody in the engineering org hates this change. I wonder if we can convince the company to switch!

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