It's not chat apps that are making things worse, it's the various companies and organizations using these apps for support channels instead of easily searchable software like forums.

It's a mixed bag. Only having a forum option reduces accessibility some for people who get anxious about putting their communication in a more permanent format. Not everyone wants their n00b questions (we all have them) indexed for all the world to see. That said, it's good to have a forum-like option that is search engine friendly to avoid repeat questions as much as possible. I remember that the Rust language had some people tasked specifically with curating an up-to-date and comprehensive body of knowledge on Stack Overflow. That apparently has helped people significantly with the learning curve of Rust.

There's software that mirrors public chats into static searchable pages, I can't remember the name but I've used it

the beauty with matrix being open-source and decentralized is that anyone can just implement indexability themselves, as someone in the thread has already given an example of

though i don't think support servers are a good idea in the first place

chats are fine. the real problem is facebook groups that replaced traditional forums. i mean, it's essentially just a simplified discussion board designed around "the flow", and as thus, is no way to share and distribute information, especially since you can't really navigate it in a way to find the right answer. so every day it's the same five questions asked over and over again, and with facebooks rules on trade for non-corporate entities, it's essentially killing some hobby industries. though, you're right in that a lot of people have also moved to discord as some kind of forum replacement, and it's even worse for the purpose of information distribution.

not that reddit or lemmy are any better. i mean, they suffer the same problem due to the way information is meant to work on them, yet people use them as forum replacements.

basically, the real problem is that people have abandoned traditional forums and use these convenient platforms as replacements. but it loses a lot of functionality along the way. and it's a sacrifice that most people just don't care about due to the convenience.

https://view.matrix.org

I actually think it's handled very well

I agree that Electron is a bottleneck. That's something they'll have to deal with. However, there's a small difference between what this post is saying and what you're saying: "24x - 1400x fafster depending on what you're measuring" is quite different to "[the changes are] not really helpful". Regardless, I'm glad to see that they're embracing Rust in some way, distancing themselves from javascript. I hope the SDK will be good enough for a bustling ecosystem of efficient clients (and servers!). I'm also glad that people like you and I are making it clear that we value the reduction of sludge, we value efficiency and therefore inclusion for everyone, including those who have devices that aren't that powerful.

isn't their server a huge mess as well? Being very resource hungry and all?

Rust in the title probably refers to the section where they talk about integrating matrix-rust-sdk into Element.

Dendrite is listed in the post - https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special-2022#dendrite--p2p

Dendrite plays an important role in our future strategy as it is also the homeserver implementation used for embedded homeservers, P2P development and experimentation. In addition to being able to scale up, we have also successfully scaled down, with the Element P2P demos proving that an embedded Dendrite homeserver can run comfortably on an iOS or Android device.

I didn't realize that Dendrite was planned to be used for P2P. I thought it was just another option you had to host a homeserver. That makes this a bit more exciting.