This doesn't really excuse it, but to give you some idea of why Element haven't spent any time on dendrite right now, here's a sample of active servers on the federation as of today:

    2025-12-01
    synapse : 10068 (85.8%)
    conduit : 476 (4.1%)
    dendrite : 369 (3.1%)
    continuwuity : 303 (2.6%)

Dendrite was a bet for two things: Could they make synapse faster? Yes. Synapse is faster now, and Synapse Pro is apparently even faster. And, can we make Matrix peer to peer? They ran out of money, and didn't have any customers who would fund it themselves. They're left with this project that is idling without a community, a customer, or a reason to exist.

Apparently, they have some funding to do work on the foundational parts of p2p now, but that will take a long time, and Dendrite is unlikely to be a part of that for a while, possibly at all (the Rust ecosystem seems to be where Element invested their time on the client, while Beeper invested in Go).

In the end, a lot of Element's pain is because of ambitious technical decisions made without a way to back them up practically or business wise. Things would be amazing if everyone working on Matrix had infinite time and money. Unfortunately, they don't, and Element is eating the consequences for acting like they did for a while. They seem to be better now, though.