Today GitLab announced that it has acquired the chat app Gitter that many communities use for communication. Also, many Laravel sub-communities use it as well, and you can find these through the Gitter Laravel Tag
Since its launch in 2014, Gitter has fast become the place to connect the open source and software development community. Over 800,000 developers have signed up to Gitter, where they can join any of the thousands of chat communities and connect with one another to discuss software and technology.
GitLab plans on releasing the Gitter application once they have time to go through the code base and remove some internal configurations. This will also allow you to run it on your infrastructure.
Another feature with the acquisition is that all private conversations will now be free and unlimited too. Gitter will continue to operate as it does now, and will more GitLab integrations will be added in the future.