Anyone considering how to break the #StackOverflow #monopoly already? Any #federated alternative work in progress?

[codeberg@social.anoxinon.de]

Anyone considering how to break the #StackOverflow #monopoly already? Any #federated alternative work in progress?

[baumicoder@social.anoxinon.de]

@Codeberg Maybe #Lemmy could be one, although it is more famous as a Reddit alternative. I am not very familiar with it.

[yurkshirelad@mastodon.social]

@BaumiCoder @Codeberg Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit, not StackOverflow. Two completely different entities.

I'm not aware of a federate alternative to StackOverflow. I think there was an open source equivalent a few years ago, but I can't remember its name.

[tauli@chaos.social]

@Codeberg being federated in the way mastodon is, would make it hard to search.

[codeberg@social.anoxinon.de]

@tauli A problem that is probably not impossible to solve.

Without wanting to go into details here, because there are probably smarter minds involved with federation who could come up with a better strategy, this is a simple idea to approach this:

- instances are often specific to topics, e.g. space, biology etc, similar to how the StackExchange network already works.

[codeberg@social.anoxinon.de]

@tauli Instances with related topics could follow each other to also search their index (or replicate the remote content in a local search index) to provide useful results from other instances.

This allows to keep the overall index small enough, because you don't have to index everything but only instances relevant to your's focus.

[maegul@hachyderm.io]

@YurkshireLad @BaumiCoder @Codeberg

Well the Reddit alternatives would likely be a good place to start. There arguably isn’t too much to add or modify to get started on a working substitute.

[naught101@mastodon.social]

@Codeberg @tauli

Not just topics, but related questions. That feature of SO is extremely useful when you initially find questions that are almost, but not quite your question. That would be fairly easy to add to a federated system.

[drewdevault@fosstodon.org]

@Codeberg passing note: SO Q&As are CC and they offer database dumps

[julian]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I'd argue that a forum with Q&A functionality is already most of what SO is.

So NodeBB can do that with the Q&A plugin, and we're moving towards federation.

[bujiraso@fosstodon.org]

@julian @Codeberg @maegul @drewdevault sic em

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@naught101 @Codeberg @tauli

It occurs to me that while #LinkedData is a fairly bad choice as the extensibility mechanism for #ActivityPub protocol, it should be in theory a rather good choice for the knowledge network and navigation thereof, of the content aggregating into the various federated SO instances.

TBL once asked about using #SolidProject to create a #FAQ and I suggested adding federation to the mix:

https://forum.solidproject.org/t/ideas-for-a-possible-faq-solid-app/4627

Nowadays also @skohub comes to mind here..