Hacker News Reader

Can I recommend you try something with laravel, just for fun?

Build a small app using laravel + filamentphp (admin/backend): https://filamentphp.com/

In one day or less you get an amazing backend system that's so easy to manage it drives me crazy how hard I had to work for the same functionality before.

Filament kinda made me fall back in love w/ Laravel to be honest.

Slim is really nice. We've used it with great success in several production systems.

Slim is the other one I'm looking at. in a just world I would be able to type "slim vs fat free framework" into google and see at least some forum posts or something comparing and contrasting the two, but all I get instead is top-ten lists that mention both without really giving a good comparison.

I've never heard of F3 so I can't compare and contrast, but Slim is definitely my go-to for projects like the one you describe. Just enough boilerplate to handle the basics, but not a ton of framework-specific quirks and conventions to learn.