

I don’t think Fediverse tends to favor PHP. Mastodon is written in Ruby, GoToSocial is Go, *key forks are Typescript for example. Pixelfed is the only one which comes in my mind for PHP.
PHP is not beginnerfriendly to setup imo. Different configuration files for different settings…
The bigger problem of Pixelfed seems the codebase and documentation. Dan is mostly alone while developing it. No public betas, just Screenshots with intresting features, which will come soon™
Then again, the documentation. I tried spinning up Pixelfed on ubuntu server with the docs provided. Laravel did not start, cryptical error message. A module was disabled in the default PHP.ini. No mention in the docs, just which PHP modules are needed. I found the solution in a Github issue