About a year ago was in many places just after the start of the pandemic, which brought a large influx of users to the default public server. It got overloaded,

About a year ago was in many places just after the start of the pandemic, which brought a large influx of users to the default public server. It got overloaded, and slowed down. I experienced it, too. They have made several rounds of significant scaling improvements since then. It's almost never slow for me any more. (And even if it was, I could always just choose a server other than matrix.org, or run my own.)