We want FOSS federated social media and people have jumped ship to Lemmy because it was the most developed at that point. But I will keep reminding people that Lemmy isn’t the only option we have. I jumped from Lemmy to Mbin because I can no longer tolerate how Lemmy devs act and IMO anyone feeling the same way should also jump ship. Lemmy devs don’t own the activitypub and Mbin can federate with Lemmy communities. You can continue using the fediverse as you’ve been using it on Lemmy, until hopefully in the future communities also start migrating to Mbin (and all the tankies can stay in Lemmy). If you don’t like the state of Lemmy, be the change you want to see.
Also worth pointing out that this kind of drama won’t happen with Mbin because the project is community maintained not individually maintained.
PHP is hardly doomed. It’s still getting new releases (last one being 19 days ago) and it’s still relatively popular for web development, which means it’s going to be support for quite a while. The rest what you’ve said about PHP is more or less just your opinion. As for Rust, Rust is a good language but Rust isn’t very popular at this moment and it’s even less popular when it comes to web development because most of the things that make Rust great are things that are simply not that important for web development. Most web development languages are performant enough, rust being even more performant isn’t going to be noticed. And because social media sites aren’t exactly security-critical Rust being memory safe won’t play a big role. The only clear benefit Rust has over PHP is being strongly typed.
But there’s a very obvious benefit to PHP. You simply develop faster. If you had 2 identical web projects, one in PHP and one in Rust, and you were equally skilled in both languages you’d finish the PHP project faster because PHP is literally designed for web development. Speed is a much bigger factor when developing a Reddit style content aggregator site.
As for the second point. You have an issue with fragmentation, but your solution to Lemmy devs refusing to cooperate is fragmentation? People forking Lemmy will also lead to fragmentation. Fragmentation is bad, but eventually people will gravitate towards one solution and fragmentation gets solved. It there’s very little different between the fragmentation happening between Lemmy forks or Lemmy and Mbin. IMO fragmentation is inevitable and I would rather see it happen right now rather than sit through N different Lemmy dramas until everyone gets so fed up with Lemmy devs that Lemmy gets forked and the fork becomes more popular than Lemmy.