People who are looking to start a SE alternative but start with the idea of importing the original SE data dumps are already Doing It Wrong. Much of the issue that has led to the desire to fork SE comes due to the license of the posts and content, which lacks the NC (NonCommercial) component of Creative Commons. Without that component, any attempt to make a Fediverse alternative just ends up in Yet Another Endpoint that can be freely siphoned for data by corporations, for AIs, etc.
See here’s the thing: Creative Commons is not an exclusionary license. If I want to make commercial use of something that has a CC-NC license, I explicitly can ask the author for a secondary license limited to the usage and scope that I need. The important thing here is that the author still retains control, as well as a data point of who is profiting from their stuff and how.
So if someone wanted to use this for work they would have to have an issue, find an answer, contact a person, and hope they can use the thing they just found to their problem?
Like, who wants that?
Heck I don’t want every person on here who found something I said useful to be hounding me about using my code either.
I said alternative to SO. As in, likely, a place to post new content (answers, comments). Nothing can really be done with the content OAI already got their hands on other than firing off a few well-placed EMP bombs.
Because to import old content, you have to respect the old license (or get every contributor of back-then to relicense). That would mean having a site with contents under differing licenses depending on date, which is something the corpos can use as an excuse to continue siphoning everything without consequence.
I’m fine with a mirror / archive of SO. But it shoudl very definitively be a different thing than an active SO alternative, and their users and data storages should be also different.
I think it would make sense to have a specialised forum for it. The question & answer format requires data that Lemmy just isn’t able to fully replicate as it is.
Also the community editable nature of stack exchange is really unique and more like a wiki than a standard forum/branching discussion threads, where we’re presumed to have sole ownership of all of our posts.
Presentation matters. Replies to posts about minor items aren’t displayed as prominently. This means the important answers are large and in charge, while debates about the merits of Rust in this situation are pushed away.
Basically any member is allowed to edit anyone else’s question or answer. The changes may go up before or after review by mods depending on the member’s trust level. I’ve had my questions changed before. It can be kind of annoying but I understand they’re doing it to maintain some level of quality.
Is that the only difference? That feature doesn’t seem great tbh. I’d love a wiki on lemmy though especially one that integrated to the point you can one click add a question + answer directly to the communities wiki
No, there are a number of differences. There’s questions & answers under which there are comments, and a bunch of other functionality. It’s so different to a standard threaded forum that you may as well build a new system from scratch. I honestly think it would be less work than trying to shoehorn lemmy into this role, and have another fediverse ecosystem built around it.
It seems to matter for the users at Stack Overflow. And why should anybody give anything for free to the crooks in Silicon Valley. All they do is create technology designed to extract value out of people and give as little as possible back.
Because that’s the nature of FOSS. The good news is, if they trained on you data that’s licensed CC BY-SA (as all SO content is), then you can request their source code, and they legally must provide it.
In the Fediverse, everyone gets access to the data. However, if privacy is what’s bugging you, then you’re free to use a forum - which is going to be archived by someone on the internet, so in a way, the stuff you post on the internet is not going to be private - there’s nothing that can be done about it, except for going under a pseudonym. However, the same cannot be said for Stack Exchange. Will they let you parse their site for free, when Reddit and other private platforms are charging money for the same? They’re using 16 years worth of free volunteer work to make lots of bucks.
In their quest for integrating AI, now the new site will vomit verbal diarrhea. Humans don’t do that. These language models are absolutely terrible in their tasks. They can’t replace humans, at least for now, we know it.
Earlier, the site was free, and their means of earning was through some sort of enterprise solution, but now that they’re going to add AI, it is going to be very resource-intensive. Who is paying for all of that? We have to, from our own pockets, for low quality answers, with no respect to the question asked by the user? Yeah, welcome to paywall 2.0!
Their lofy model will use answers from 2010s to train their data, most of which isn’t applicable in today’s time. Will you be using X11 configs for Wayland on Linux? Or GTK+ solutions for GTK4?
It’s not about privacy. It’s about AI companies stealing other peoples work and knowledge and profiting. Like what they did with artists. And I think that’s bothering a lot of people. It’s kind of sad that we cannot exchange information with each other for free, without some Silicon Valley crooks taking advantage and trying to convert other people’s good will into profit.
These LLMs are also polluting the web with AI junk and slop. The web is absolutely tainted with shitty ChatGPT text and images, making it harder and harder to find authentic information. I think a lot of people don’t want to contribute with that.
IMHO stack exchange is basically reddit/lemmy with hand cuffs because no threaded discussions and every other question is closed as off topic. I don’t understand what another stack exchange would buy anybody.
I guess one thing stack exchange does well is “related questions” and tagging, but… I dunno. (shrugs)
Useful constraints would focus discussion to keep questions/replies brief, relevant, and hopefully helpful, wouldn’t they? I just wonder how up and downvoting would work since that would go very differently from Lemmy.
I’m sure this has been solved already but I’m just wondering how you ensure people are voting based on the helpfulness and/or merit of the response. That’s the ideal on Lemmy but it’s obviously not always the case here. Presumably, you’d have to be logged in on the other platform to vote but you can just see the discussion from Lemmy, I guess?
And guess what, it can be done just as easily, if not, more easily on a federated instance. You don’t gain at real additional control over your data (and no putting “covered under license X” is about as realistic as those Facebook posts saying “I don’t give anyone access to my posts”).
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, realistically the only way to control your data from AI is a DRM type solution which everyone fundamentally hates.
With a few more additions, lemmy could serve as a good replacement. We already have a Forum / NewComments sort which is perfect for question / answer type communities. We could add a feature to make default sorts for specific communities, so they would feel less fast, or possibly a sort that brings zero comment posts (IE meaning unanswered), to the top.
The reputation and “accepted answer” features from SO are a lot less important than threaded comments can be, especially since questions often need new answers every year, making the “accepted answer” pointless.
Especially with Lemmy getting support for plugins soon, I don’t see the need for making a new platform
A new sorting method for “unanswered” is a cool idea. I’m not sure if it’s quite as simple as just finding posts with 0 comments, because people can put additional questions in the comments but it’s still unanswered. Also how do you sort them for posts with the same number of comments/answers. But this is definitely something that a plugin could handle.
I saw someone else suggested we could just put “[unanswered]” in the title and then edit the title to “[answered]”
Yep! It seems a good Threadiverse ecosystem could be on its way with lemmy etc, nodebb and discourse. Hooking a stack overflow alternative into that could make a lot of sense of kick starting it.
Though at some point UI differences could prove problematic(?)
Yes, forum platforms too (incl #nodebb of course).
I do get the (very vague) impression discourse is focusing on integrating well with masto to a good extent and so might not integrate too well with the other Reddit/forum platforms. If true, that might be a good enough reason to start with another base. OTOH, it’s a familiar platform to many devs so adapting it for stackoverflow like use could go well right?
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