And there is so much idle chatter to scroll through. I shouldn't have to scan through months of jokes and memes to get updated.

Heck, even with a handful of people anything longer form feels like a chore. I've been the admin of a tiny friends only server for a good few years and even in there it feels hard to keep track sometimes when there's more than a single laser focused topic.

for real, my local rhythm games community is split among 3 different servers (that I know of) organising meet ups is a challenge nowadays

Imo it's decent at what it set out to be: user friendly, painless realtime chatting, with some voice/video calling to top it up. That said, they keep adding questionable bloat to try and upsell Nitro subs so honestly I can only see it worsening as time goes on.