Thanks everyone for the feedback.
Mattermost uses GitLab to communicate with the GitLab Mattermost community and we have a product page there.
Yes, we have a lot of communication channels. Our current thinking is that:
####a) We want to make it easy for people to communicate.
Some users prefer forums, some issues, some mailing lists, some tweets, given the 1% rule (i.e. 99% of internet readers don’t speak), we want to make it as easy as possible to hear from the community.
Regarding Jira specifically, this comes from our previous life as a video game company, where Jira is largely the standard. Our processes work well in Jira Agile and we’d rather spend our energy building for the community than changing something internal that is working.
####b) Using a broad range of communications helps us build infrastructure to support a diverse set of future integrations.
It’s definitely a lot of work for us to monitor everything–and we’re far from perfect. However this pushes us to build internal integrations with Mattermost that we can later bring to the community.