I second helpscout! Amazingly great service that does one thing and does it well. There's nothing like an intuitive system that does its job well and gets out of the way so you can crank through tickets!

Do you need control over all the wipbot clones and influence over the spin-off communities other than being the source of record? If not then why not make a wip api and have people roll their own wipbot. I'd love to be able to do stuff over mastodon instances (which has a totally different feel since it's async and permanent) or other public places, even if not direct chat...variations in styles there would be pretty cool and would free you from a billion feature requests for different types of bots that different communities would want.

As for the actual idea, I'm all for it. I've never been given permissions to post in the main telegram chat though I joined more than a month ago, and it kind of stinks since I wanted the group accountability...plus everyone just seemed really fun. If this were decentralized I could just go to another community.

One con that you didn't mention though, is decreased stability of membership. Communities are hard to maintain, especially large ones. It's not uncommon for 50 or 60 active users to be in a community and then 1 or 2 core people stop paying attention or leave and the whole community just falls apart or peters out. You get cash from this, so I assume you'll be around for a bit. But if large swaths of people are in other places then I worry when those peter out they won't go to another community, they'll just stop.

There's a middle ground here too that you didn't mention. Multiple groups that you control but people can only be in one at a time. It's sort of a strange setup, but that way there is centralized "management" while allowing autonomous communities. The community would either have a leader, or a group of core members could naturally emerge. This also lets you spin ones up and down with minimal risk of alienation: spin one up and people will know about it through the centralized area, spin one down because it's only 3 inactive people and you let them choose which to move to of the existing ones. It also allows there to be driving force for coherency...there would never be a problem with scammy product groups because it's not a natural offshoot of an existing group or group of people currently on the site. As stuff grows you can choose what to allow and what not to without dictating what the next one necessarily is and thus killing the organic evolutionary vibe. Sort of a meta-moderator, which would be a much easier/lower-touch gig. This does require light infrastructure though, which might be something you're generally trying to avoid putting in place.

There's also a last question here: What's your intention? Do you have a vision for where wip.chat is going? If this is the main site and you want it to evolve organically then do it...seems like it increases surface area for many things quite a bit. If you want to turn this into something different, then it might critically limit your future options. Since it's a community oriented site/group then it might be uncomfortable to talk about...but in the end you do hold the keys to the place, so what vision you do or don't have really should be taken into consideration.