Totally not a gitter platform issue, but these platforms aren't really distinguishable from their user communities at the end of the day.
If Facebook only had 2-3 of your friends on it, no one would be impressed by the features and sophistication, they wouldn't get that far.
Some projects prefer email/github issues over chat as there isn't an active community around it 24/7 for anyone to just jump in and ask away.
I maintain an open source project where we have set up Gitter awhile ago. So far -even with a really small community like ours- I'm answering questions and interacting with users regularly.