I feel like you could’ve asked “what’s your favorite language?” and gotten the same responses. Like, it’s Rust for me. I could argue that because Lemmy is written in Rust, there’s already some mature libraries to work off of, but someone else could argue that for e.g. Ruby, too.

Whatever language you chose you might want to also look at the htmx JS library. It lets you write in your html snippets better interactivity without actually needing to write JS. It basically lets you do things like when you click on an element, it can make a request to your server and replace some other element with the contents your server responds with - all with attributes on HTML tags instead of writing JS. This lets you keep all the state on the backend and lets you write more backend logic without only relying on full page refreshes to update small sections of the page.

For a backend language I would use rust as that is what I am most familiar with now and enjoy using the most. Most languages are adequate at serving backend code though so it is hard to go wrong with anything that you enjoy using. Though with rust I tend to find I have fewer issues when I deploy something as appose to other languages which can cause all sorts of runtime errors as they let you ignore the error paths by default.

Rust, because I’m lazy and I want a compiler that helps me out. Performance is a pretty neat bonus.

C#. Since I’m a .NET developer it’s the stack I’m most familiar with.

Honestly I kind of like the idea of a front end with as little JS as possible.

If I really hate front end, but still want a lot of the responsiveness of a SPA, I’d have to give ASP.NET Blazor a serious thought.

It’s largely all back end driven, with the dynamic elements driven via webassembly that pretty much works like black magic.

Most of my experience is in .NET at work. My professional recommendation is C#, but my personal recommendation is Go. I find Go to be just nicer to code with.

You’re asking about the backend only, separated from the fronted? The fronted will be HTML only, but independent of the backend anyway?

Doesn’t that mean you’re introducing another interface and a need for another backend for the HTML frontend generating?

If it’s independent, why does the frontend intention matter?

My first choice/exploration would be C#/.NET.

The frontend is HTML only? Then I’d go with C# and ASP.NET Razor pages. Modern language with good DX, performant runtime, and server-side rendering.

Maybe Go, haven’t messed with it at all and it looks interesting enough to try. Other than that I could do C#, since that’s where I have most experience. Maybe node.js if I would want to suffer a bit.

Easy, golang. All yall getting a serving of HTML when you enter the templ of htmx.

Any language you’re comfortable with is good for that. Ruby, JS, and Go come to mind the first because they all have solid ActivityPub libraries which are going to save you some time on interconnection. Any programming language can do static html.

I’ve considered doing something similar myself, honestly it would come down to which one has the best libraries/frameworks for it.

Crystal + Kemal (Like Ruby + Sinatra but way faster, compiled) for the backend and templating with ECR (like ERB) and HTMX for the front-end (though HTMX is JS it feels like HTML with added features.

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I would want something simple, extensible, and easily readable. I would write in the clearest way possible in Bash with small, single purpose programs handling anything performance critical.