When I say "optional", I mean you can just create a filename.php and start putting lines of code into it, and it'll work fine. But, these days OOP is favored by most and pretty much everyone is using it. So if you are working on code that other people have written, classes are everywhere.
A lot of Wordpress code is non-OOP, though.
No, OOP is optional in PHP.
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.
You don't need to read much history to find plenty of bad things done by non-commercial entities, e.g. governments. Or churches.
It's not commerce that is the problem, it is oppression. Use of my code for oppressive purposes is the thing I want to avoid.
I wonder if Gab was invited. It would be hilarious if the only instances willing to federate with Meta were Nazis.
It doesn't work for me, on Firefox or Chrome. Chrome reports ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR