I was going to suggest Python too but you'll need to be careful to just use functionality that is part of the standard library because once you start pulling in 3rd party packages deployment is much harder and portability seems to be a requirement here. That should be doable with your case.

The free edition of PyCharm is great for debugging.

While it is technically possible to write shell scripts that do as much as what you're attempting to, it's not a good idea.

Shell scripts generally don't have the development environment necessary for debugging. You can't pause execution based on a breakpoint and inspect variables, or step through the code line by line to watch the execution flow as it happens. Well, bashdb exists, but it's quite hard to use.

Without proper debugging tooling you're limited to printing stuff out on the screen and trying to figure out what that means. That's ok for short scripts (< 50 lines?) but yours is 700+ lines.

Laravel has been around for a long long time (decades?) so I'm pretty sure whatever AI stuff they're adding are optional packages that can be ignored if they're not for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

That's a secret. But the selfhost community has lots of advice, e.g. https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world/p/2146191/safely-exposing-services-to-the-internet

Yeah it's not great. I could have a PSU blow out any time and it'll take me days to sort it out, probably. I have a spare server (these things are < $100 so why not) but getting it ready for prime time wouldn't be quick either.

Anyway the resiliency of the fediverse is in the network - people can just use another instance for their fix of shitposts until their main comes back.

A long-time mastodon contributor is shutting down their instance - https://vmst.io/@vmstan/116757564108266599

Small instances close down all the time but in this case it's not just anyone's instance.

This new environment will provide developers with an incentive to find ways to rein in their platform's storage and CPU usage.

The next shoe to drop will be when S3 object storage prices double or triple. That'll really thin the herd.

I left Hetzner after the price increase a couple of months ago, expecting that hike not to be the last.

Now I run my own hardware. It feels good to 'own the means of federation' and not rent it!