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I have heard so, too. Maybe I'll give it or some of its derivatives a try some time.

I think there is a some sort of catch-22 going on. Matrix Foundation can't fund the replacement of Synapse with a better-designed server, because hosting matrix.org consumes all the money. And it consumes so much money because it runs Synapse, which uses computing resources in a very inefficient manner.

And the Foundation might have a some sort of conflict-of-interest, since it is closely interwoven with the New Vector company, which business case is being able to make Synapse work despite its flaws.

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There's an official Golang rewrite called dendrite: https://github.com/element-hq/dendrite it has few start because they recentyl migrated it from the original repo (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite) Development is not fast but it's going on, and it's currently on beta. I haven't tried it, I selfhost a synapse server which I used with friends, and with docker it wasn't hard to set up/maintain after the initial effort.

It's dead https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit...

Only the Apache-licensed version is dead. The commercial arm (Element) forked it and relicensed it under the AGPL to make sure nobody but them can use their post-fork changes commercially. (Element demands you sign a CLA to contribute. Don’t[1].)

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html

I mean, for years Dendrite was positioned, by the developers of Synapse themselves, to become Synapse's successor, and Dendrite was getting a ton of funding and attention to make sure it happens.

It didn't then, and now that the situation is dire for Dendrite (with no funding and no official effort being put into it), I have little hope things are going to improve.

Very easy to set up (without the Docker nonsense, it's just a binary that is trivial to build), but the real work was in maintaining it. After the third case of database table inconsistencies from joining large public rooms (or perhaps from upgrading it, or a combination) I regretfully had to give up on it. It was time consuming to find out the table structure being used and how to manually correct the data so that it would start again. People were generally helpful on irc but it's just not fun work and feels a bit unnecessary.

I thought it was just because they make their income by selling faster server software. The free one can't be fast, in that case.

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