There were a number of issues that lead to the decision not to do a grab and seed of SE into codidact.
There was the "what license is that post actually under? Is it 2.5? 3.0? 4.0?" which made things difficult.
There was the "what are the actual attribution requirements that SE has for sites that use its content?" This is a bit of an issue because it's never really clear what those requirements are and what you need to do. It can also hurt SEO because it's duplicated content. Furthermore, codidact leadership had already and enough dealings with SE lawyers and likely wanted to avoid any other.
Lastly, there was the desire to make a philosophical break with SE. The codidact founders didn't want to have anything to do with SE.
Some sites are doing ok. Others stood up but didn't have sufficient involvement to keep them going.
Having an imported site that is mostly inactive with activity on that same content is even more disappointing than having a mostly empty site. And active mirroring is a time-consuming process that runs into rate limit issues with an API.
I haven't used codidact (sorry, name needs replacing), ok just poked around
* too slow
* needs type ahead find search
* needs a GIST experience
The site looks good, presentation is really clean. Lots to like about it. But the think that replaces SO is going to have to be a step function in capabilities. That said, just fixing the weird descend into performative rule following and language-lawyering on SO might be that step function.
* "Tipping" or actually giving money to a question answerer would be cool
* Having a question asker being able to put a bounty on question would be cool
On the face of it, I am not getting scalability (in many senses) vibes from codidact.
Personally when the fork happened, I was interested in it... but I'm mostly "meh" about it since its another Q&A style format that maintains all the advantages and disadvantages of the format that SO provides.
I really hoped that they would have gone for something much more radical in terms of trying to create a way to share knowledge.
It's Stack(Exchange|Overflow) with better governance and a different development cycle time and focus - and I appreciate that... but its still that same Stack in terms of underlying format.
I would have been more interested if they went to something like how Discourse is different from forums. It's still a forum, but it took the structure of a forum in a new way that solves some of the traditional forum issues.
But getting that community there, and stable, and growing is a very hard problem. It's one of the things that Reddit and SO are fairly successful at doing because of the network effects and the corresponding exoduses from other services when they were growing.
There was a compelling story to tell of "why do you ant to switch." There's a story now, but mastodon, Lemmy, codidact and similar haven't really stood out. It feels like "we're the same but better... if you ignore the performance of the site."
"Yea, I could switch from reading reddit to reading Lemmy... but it doesn't have a feed of 200 cat pictures I need each day for my daily dose of eye bleach."
The shtshow is the reason to switch, but there also needs to be new capabilities on the other side. As soon as they break old.reddit.com, I am out.
I feel like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub is 10x more complex than it needs to be. The SO replacement should be an application on-top of an existing protocol.
We outlined some of our broad goals (intended differentiators) here: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/276296, in case that helps. Codidact is a work in progress. The biggest non-technical difference from SO is how we treat communities and their members: communities have a lot more autonomy, and we treat people decently. No stockholders are driving anti-community business decisions.
On the technical level, while Q&A is central, we also have other post types and other models. That post I linked to is an article in a blog that's part of our Meta community. The Electrical Engineering community has papers, so people can present information outside of the Q&A structure. Code Golf has a sandbox where people can get feedback on draft challenges before posting them. Software Development has a Code Review category. Some of our communities have added their own customizations to the code, like Code Golf's leaderboard for challenge answers. We want to work together with our communities to build what best serves their needs.
We've done some things that look small but might have larger effects. For example, the asker of a question can't mark one answer as "accepted" like on SO, but anybody can mark an answer as "works for me" -- or "outdated", or other annotations that communities can define. Scoring takes controversy into account, because +10/-5 and +5/-0 are very different even if they're both "net 5". With threaded comments, it doesn't matter so much if two people have an extended conversation; it's not in the way. Abilities are granted based on activity and reputation is just a number -- or can be turned off entirely if that's what a community wants. We're trying to make as much stuff configurable as we can, because we can't possibly know what's going to be best for every single community and don't have the hubris to claim we do.
We have the usual bootstrapping problem of a new thing. Our communities are small and trying to grow. Because they're small, visitors don't see thousands of questions and high activity, so they don't participate either and wander away, making it harder to build activity. We would love to find people who want to work with us to build communities. We recognize that helping to build a community with us is going to be harder and slower than just asking your question on SO, but if everyone were happy with SO this thread wouldn't be here, so maybe we're an option to a few people reading this?
(I haven't posted much on Hacker News, so I hope I've read the room correctly and that this kind of comment is ok. If not, I apologize and would appreciate correction so I don't repeat mistakes. Thank you.)
