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.
PHP is huge and more relevant than you realise. There are many many PHP developers.
IMO one of the things holding the fediverse back is that not much of it is written in Python or PHP. Neither are “good” languages but there is a massive pool of developers and they’re easy to get up and running.