| 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. I'd also suggest checking out https://topanswers.xyz ( https://topanswers.xyz/tex is one of the more active ones). For example https://topanswers.xyz/tex?q=4593 - and you'll note that there's a chat rather than comments on a question or an answer... 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.