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Is there a federated/non-profit alternative to Stack Overflow? (beehaw.org)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by Templa@beehaw.org to c/programming@beehaw.org

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Considering how SO is killing itself rather quickly, it would be interesting to have a platform with similar structure but taking users interests instead of profit of executives. I am not saying their system is perfect, I have made a post in the past on their meta community regarding how hard it is for new contributors to start. I remember hearing about an alternative but after searching for it, I couldn't find anything.

Does anyone know such platform?

Edit: After I posted I came across Codidact. I will try using it! Feel free to post other alternatives though!

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[–] Templa@beehaw.org 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Discourse is fine, thank you for sharing! I visit a few forums on Discourse but I didn't know there are so many communities forming using it.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago

Yea it's pretty popular and generally I like that, especially compared to the whole discord thing (though real time chat is also a valuable platform).

Ideally, I'm with you and IMO this would be something where the fediverse could shine.

It feels to me like many pieces are already in place for some people to come together and create a fediverse space for filling that SO function. Lemmy, NodeBB and discourse (when they get federation stable, however close/far that is) are all there.

What's likely needed is for the right pieces and modifications to be put together, the right instance, some basic branding and commitments, donations, sponsorships (and even ads would be appropriate here IMO if done tastefully).

But, in reality the devs on the fediverse are spread pretty thin and many developers generally are in a bit of a squeeze at the moment. Financial support hasn't reached a healthy equilibrium on the fediverse, culturally and probably quantitatively, in that further growth, creativity and adaptation at any decent rate doesn't really seem viable.

Back in the heyday of the twitter migration to mastodon or reddit migration to lemmy, there likely would have been some dev ready to go out on a limb and try to scramble something together (however healthy that is). That energy has passed and there doesn't seem to be a more stable substitute set of incentives for new devs to build new things here (though there are of course devs building on the fediverse, lemmy and newer projects like SL, piefed and bonfire included). Instead it seems like the dev community on the fediverse has settled and they all have their work set.

So the best bet would probably be for some eager volunteers to take the best platform for the job (possibly NodeBB ATM) and put up an instance and see what happens. I think there's been enough interest, including this post, to make it interesting.

And what's especially interesting is that the SO archive, AFAICT, is open and available for download, so there's a real possibility of having a live archive of SO for search coupled with new content, right here on the fediverse.