Can't speak for the author. I haven't seen the reasoning. The awareness of the app wasn't that great though. I only found out it existed right as Slack changed

Can't speak for the author. I haven't seen the reasoning. The awareness of the app wasn't that great though. I only found out it existed right as Slack changed the organisation token/auth which never got fully implemented in Ripcord. There was only one post that got lots of attention on HN and that was before the pandemic. (With a pretty good reception, mostly around being light/not-electron https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617699) Can't speak to the feature compatibility completely, but testing it over a week or so I've not found anything missing at the time. I think the video calls got added after the development stopped and that never arrived. Then Discord started banning third party / differently behaving clients, so that part got dangerous.