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Comment by olvy0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't, and I consider it a wasted effort. There are existing apps for messaging.

Unless your app is a social app, and even then I'd integrate messaging only if it's a core ability.

At work, the team that was responsible for the app before I came along, 12 years ago, wanted to integrate a messaging ability into our internal company app.

I was literally shocked when they told me that, since that it reflected such a disconnect from reality, reality being the app was extremely crashy, not documented, and filled with bugs, and a disconnect from what users really wanted (I'm a former user turned core dev) that I couldn't even believe these people were for real.

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I’ve started using email all over for “internal app messaging” because it’s pretty great. mailto: hyperlinks are actually quite capable if you read the docs. I made a gem for my Rails apps at https://github.com/rocketshipio/mailto that makes it super easy to pretty much compose messages for people who want to send you a support or sales request via Erb templates.

For outbound messaging, emails are sent from the sever.

It would be awesome if other applications, like Teams, Slack, and Discord had a mailto:-like integration, but they don’t.

I like your perspective. It reinforces and states more bluntly what were my thoughts on this topic.

But the app is partly a social commenting app, with reddit style comments. And for some other features, there are some one-on-one communications that need to happen. For now, those conversations happen out of band ( discord, ... ). Users that are out of the loop just miss out and even users that are in the discord room keep asking for in-app messages regularly. That's why now, it's on the todo list.

The company I work for has had (for many years) an internal feed mechanism, where you can create groups and posts, like and reply, etc.

Post COVID, 99.99% of the company is using Teams for quick sync chats, WhatsApp for company broadcasts, and email for longer term async chats. We're probably going to deprecate the feed mechanism.

My takeaway is unless your solution is so compelling that it will draw people away from these existing platforms and the network effect that draws them into them, its not worth the effort.

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