I'm not sure what you're actually trying to say by that. Svelte has fine-grained opt-in reactivity. If you don't declare a variable with $state, it won't be reactive. That's by design and not a problem.
It's not hard to write a post with an ulterior motive (like embedding an affiliate link) on Reddit, but it's hard to get people to vote for it so it shows up at the top of the thread. Meanwhile, content producers that feel entitled to be in the SERP are just spamming their ads and aff. links everywhere. That's why Reddit is better.
Nice work on creating the app! I can't see myself using it right now because it looks like Trello (which I currently use) just with less features and a smaller free plan. Perhaps you can work on some product differentiation further ahead!
The $5 plan sounds good and affordable, but I think the VPS comparison is disingenuous because you can typically put a lot of things on a $5-10 dollar VPS. I pay $20/mo and have something like 30 low-usage apps running on a single server. With Railway that would cost me $150.
Some of the costs people rarely consider for europeans is VAT (25% extra) and the decreasing price of european currencies. In the last ten years USD is 30% stronger against EUR and about 40% against my local currency. So for me this is more like a $60 dollar product than $30, and that's not just feelings.
The problem here is everyone thinks their product is so damn valuable. I happily pay $20/mo for OpenAI because it genuinely speeds up my work every day. I would easily pay twice that. In terms of saved time this product will maybe save me 20-30 minutes per month? It's individual for everyone, but judging by other responses I'm hardly alone here in this sentiment.
It is different in the sense that you can sign up for it without having a Facebook account and actually not have them connected at all. It's good enough for me. What was not good enough was having your Messenger friends randomly inside your VR headset, and that has been fixed.
I hope you will mature one day and that you will see that whatever bad experience you had with PHP (probably many years ago if not decades) is not universal.
This app is dead in the water. That doesn't mean it's not gonna provide some usefulness to groups of people, just that a iOS-only, freemium group chat will never reach mass appeal if their goal is to make money off of it.
It took me about six months to notice anything to be honest. I've been on it for almost two years now and I still don't feel 100% but I feel like it's a very very very slow gradual improvement.