There was some back and forth among designers about the risk of this feature being detrimental to the concept of a “team”.

If a few people on a team need to talk about temporary topics like “New logo project”, or “Spring 2016 offsite planning”, it seems easiest for them to create a private group for the discussion and archive it when they were done (note: Channels aren’t ever deleted, all information is archived, so there’s no data loss issue: https://docs.mattermost.com/help/getting-started/organizing-conversations.html#deleting-a-channel).

An option to restrict this feature could degrade the user experience. People would have to talk about niche topics inside other channels, distracting teammates who aren’t involved, or clutter the public channel list with overly narrow topics.

Despite these problems, there’s a case to be made for large organizations where social policy doesn’t scale, so the option has been added to Enterprise Edition and kept the complexity out of Team Edition: https://docs.mattermost.com/administration/config-settings.html#enable-public-channel-management-permissions-for

If you’re a non-profit running a community, please consider requesting a non-profit license (https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-mondays/).

If you’re an academic institution, please consider requesting an academic license (https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-academic-licensing/).

If you’re a team, consider setting expectations for your team on how channels should be used.

If you’re a commercial organization that prefers IT policy over social policy, consider getting a subscription to Enterprise Edition: https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/