In defense of them not admitting any kind of mistake, maybe it's not actually a mistake but instead a really well thought out, yet incredibly stupid, plan.
I have administered a number of Mattermost environments going back to 2019.
It absolutely is not a mistake. They’ve been slowly introducing limits to the Team Edition and screwing with the licensing in obtuse ways to drive revenue. It is something that has executive force behind it.
I have migrated everyone/everything to Zulip, which it turns out has a far better user experience and a much cleaner model. The admin tools are much more mature (and actually function reliably). I have not gotten any complaints.
And I also don’t have to deal with things like on-premise to managed cloud back to on-prem migrations due to ridiculous licensing and pricing instability.
It works exceptionally well for Slack as we've seen over the years. Someone in your $group uses signs up for the free tier, gets people using it and then you've got to pay through the nose to access any history.
At least slack is clear upfront that this is going to happen, mattermost just did a rug pull and removed history from users who previously had access to it.
That'd be even more reason for them to have a solid PR plan prepared, to grind down opposition and gaslight everyone into giving up. Leaving all messaging about the issue to upset users is the worst way to handle it. Even just closing the issue would've been less damaging at this point.
