if it's rust, i could probably just build it myself any interest in publishing to crates.io or something?

Not really ... Once you start putting it in flathub or snapstore etc... someone complains it's not in their favorite place. Crates would be the easiest though. It is in rust though, so easy to build.

rust has the best build system i've ever used

Now that I think of it, of I were to do a app store or package repo, it would probably be flathub, since it has sort of become the Linux defacto.

you could do an appimage then you don't need to publish anywhere i think flatpak is a lot better though