[sstangl]

We switched to Zulip because of a bad experience with Slack holding our message history hostage. At the same time we switched to GitLab because we didn't want a similar issue to arise with our issue tracker.

It was non-trivial to get the issues out of GitHub, and we lost metadata in the process. But now we're on a platform that has an "Export Everything" button, and in the worst case we can self-host our own data.

Although that's why we moved, and we didn't know about it at the time, "Service Desk" became a killer feature. That lets users file issues directly into our GitLab issue tracker by sending an email -- no account setup necessary. The majority of our users are non-technical and this has made it much easier for them to communicate with us.