> Flowers recommends building a community on a chat platform like Discord, Gitter, or Slack to make it easier for people to get involved informally with a project.

Sample size n = 1, but I saw a lot more engagement on my projects when I was hosting mattermost helpdesks for people to join and ask their questions. Unfortunately I had to shut them down because turns out having random individuals ping you on your phone about an issue that is well documented gets very draining.

So definitely a double-edged sword.