A call to everyone in the wider @gstreamer community:
In addition to providing a more modern system for realtime and non-realtime discussions for the @gstreamer community, one of the main goals with setting up a #discourse and @matrix instance was to provide an official location for discussions on the development of, and with, GStreamer instead of several different silos.
Over the years (decade?), we have all moved those discussions in various places (reddit, stack-overflow, discord, slack, internal company chats, etc...). Now is the time to bring those discussions back to a central location so we can all benefit from our shared knowledge and expertise.
Having all those discussions in various places are impossible to follow, and sometimes only the outcome is shared in "official" places (gitlab, discourse, matrix) which means that a lot of the background and thought process is missing and has to be repeated again. A waste of time for everybody.
Same for new ideas or questions; discussing them in other places misses the feedback of the whole collective. Maybe someone else has looked into that problem/idea; the earlier you share it, the earlier people can chip in and point out their experience or thoughts (or heck, even a link to the solution/code !).
I have definitely fallen guilty to only discussing such things in closed silos, and sorely miss the "old times" where all discussions were happening in an official open location.
Some might think that such and such discussion isn't worthy yet of discussing it in discourse/matrix. But keep in mind that those places have search features (your discussion might provide an answer to someone else later), and referencing previous discussions is also much easier. So by having those discussions there you actually enrich that collective knowledge.
Furthermore, as discussions and topics grow, it is trivial to create new rooms/categories to have discussions more centered and avoid information overload (which isn't great either).
The next time you have a discussion related to GStreamer in closed/other silos ask yourself the question "Shouldn't we be discussing this with in the GStreamer discourse/matrix?"
@gstreamer isn't great just because of the code, it's great because of its community and collective knowledge and what we can build together.