I’m not much of a programmer and my free time is too limited to move quickly, but the functionality looks possible based on the published frontend API. Someone will almost certainly beat me to it, but I am hoping to write a browser extension that replaces the blue “You are not logged in…” boilerplate text about how to subscribe to a remote community with a subscribe button that does the dirty work in the background for you.

Why is php a bad thing in this case? It seems like exactly the kind of application that php is well suited for. Plus there’s the maturity of php’s major frameworks. While I’m not saying Rust is necessarily bad for building web applications, it’s web frameworks must be less mature and battle tested. Plus, it seems like a lower bar to get community dev contributions for a php project than rust.

I don’t use SimpleX, but it’s hard to argue against a well developed open source privacy focused messaging app. There are a million “privacy-focused” messengers out there with various flaws around security or sustainability. Matrix is great but the goals seem a little different. Plus, it wasn’t that long ago that Matrix was struggling to find funding.