Is PHP still a relevant language in today’s day and age? I know a LOT of languages and it just never occurred to me to learn this one, because anyone I’ve ever been aware of writing a backend these days would either choose Node or one of several compiled languages. Lemmy uses Rust for it’s backend which is highly desireable, many people would have used Golang in the backend world if they desired performance and compilation, otherwise I don’t know why you wouldn’t just use Typescript. Makes it hard to contribute to IMO.
I really like Kbin and it’s amazing that Ernest did pretty much everything alone, but I feel like the choice of language will eventually become a bottleneck for the project. A project of this scale needs contributors, but PHP is kind of left in the past relative to other languages, I think many people are put off by it who would otherwise contribute.
Me for instance, I’d much rather contribute to Lemmy which is in Rust and gain experience with an upcoming language, instead of learning PHP just for Kbin and then dumping that knowledge in the closet.