I think it was Italy as location setting on the user name that threw me off as briandc is also listed as such.
I am however, on your note re. identity federation and features, after getting involved in very active facebook groups with instant troubleshooting, nicely structured in threads and sub-threads, getting a bit impatient with classic legacy phpbb posts like this one right here.
Mentioned it during our Saturday meet as well, inspired by how Jamulus and Sonobus has transformed my music life because you're actually talking togethere or at least have an easy method to meet and talk, besides playing only, or as we do here, read and write each other.
Challenge for both formats is maintaining accessible shared knowledge, either by search or content structure, that supplements RTFM. Haven't yet tried a format where FAQ alike bullet points and key info is easily filtered out for others afterwards.
https://forum.manjaro.org is discourse powered (IIRC or is it discuss?), seems to be reddit-ish with votes up and down plus neat time and sub-thread filtering
Mattermost is some kind of Slack FLOSS not evil twin, haven't tried either (test at
https://framateam.org or
https://cloudron.io/store)
diaspora* Project maybe a better fit,
https://diasporafoundation.org/
Or we should pony up as a user community and gather some server money for the projects we use and invite them all in on a yourproject.linuxmusic.org server and give them a space to easily present and host their code and documentation and user generated input from our talks and suggestions. Take all the dev ops burden away from the small teams we rely upon while they keep their freedom to brand their wares as they prefer.
During my Solus stint they switched to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator which impressed me greatly, keeps everything in one database, code - git - bugs - documentaion - forum talk - casual so-me connections.