I'm unhappy with the python implementation's performance too (ran it on a $5 VPS for a while and then gave up) but I think the Go implementation is much better and catching up in features really quickly, and I'd be happy to give it a shot again when I have more time.

Speak for yourself. The recent addition of space-protected rooms eliminated one of the biggest issues preventing my local hackerspace from using it.

(Of course, it did so roughly as we finally qualified for the nonprofit Slack plan, so it was a bit too late to have a real advantage - but it's an option now where it wasn't before.)

I've been using spaces for a while, but I am genuinely still baffled by it. Intuitively, a space should be where I group rooms or people in a non-overlapping way, and cleanup the side-panel clutter... But I can access all rooms from all spaces, so what is it's purpose exactly other than a namespace in which to connect to other places?

The most important thing in my view is that you can invite other people to the space, and you can use that membership to control access to multiple rooms.

So let's say I were using Matrix for the hackerspace. With spaces, I can invite a new member to the space and they can join whatever associated rooms they want on their own.

Without spaces, I'd be stuck either inviting people individually to every room, or making every room completely public, neither of which are particularly palatable.

while I think there is a lot of room for improvement, I don't think that's true.

Copied from last "This week in Matrix":

- Another big thing in Synapse 1.69 is experimental support for faster remote room joins!

- The new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) composer is available in Labs soon; It’s in active development and we’ll be adding more functionality soon.

- Notifications research is near conclusion; We trawled hundreds of GitHub issues, discussions, looked at competitors and interviewed some users. We’re really excited to bring improvements to your experience.

- Threads is making great progress and we’re hoping you’ll start seeing these improvements in the next few weeks! Keep your eyes open for updates.