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Anyone building a federated Stack Overflow?

Ben Pate 🤘🏻

@dansup Yes. After Bandcamp.

I had an online discussion about a Federated-Yelp that raised some interesting points that might apply to SO as well -- How do you “federate” the features that DON’T fit into the standard social media formulae? Things like “accepted answers” might only work on a centralized server.

Also, this might fall under the threaded discussion WG. I’d love to talk in more detail if you’re ever interested.

@benpate@mastodon.social @dansup@mastodon.social a federated StackOverflow would be an excellent use case that would benefit directly from the work ForumWG is doing (yes, "Forum and Threaded Discuss Task Force" is the official name, but ForumWG rolls off the tongue better, no?)

Dan, if you're interested, the WG meets up first Thursday of every month, 11am Mountain Time.

@benpate @dansup probably not a real problem, this partly incompatibilities exist since the Fediverse is around, so 14 years or so, the only way is to discuss ideas and then implement some solution that works for all sides.

In the past there was Diaspora (still exists) that was the big player, that had fewer functions than for example Frienidca, they somehow arranged and it worked quite well. Today Mastodon is the big player, now others arrange their projects around the reduced feature set that Mastodon had... It kind of works, mostly.

@utzer @dansup Yeah. We could always just build a new network with special features that would require an account on a Q&A -style server.

But an emerging feature of "fedi" is that you can take your identity everywhere. I'd really like to support this somehow, too.

Perhaps it just means using main Mastodon (or whatever) account as a "universal inbox" for notifications. But then we link you back to a site with SSO, so you can interact more richly there.

Dunno.. TBD.

I'll take any/all advice.

@benpate@mastodon.social @utzer@soc.utzer.de may I pose a question?

What is the actual difference between a site like StackOverflow (or their sister sites on the exchange) vs. a forum with a question-and-answer functionality built in?

At its core, as Ben alluded to, each question is essentially a "topic/thread", with immediate replies considered "answers", and further sub replies considered "comments".

An accepted answer needn't federate, though it can always provide that information via a separate ActivityStreams property.

My assertion isn't that StackOverflow does anything different "technically", but that their network effect and centralization, along with being the only good option to ExpertsExchange, allowed them to prosper.

@julian @utzer

Yes. Stack Overflow isn't magic. I think they succeeded because they focused heavily on SEO, which brought both ask-ers and answer-ers to the site.

Personally, the "accepted answer" is the killer feature. Dunno if NodeBB, Kbin, or others already support this.

There's potential in SO's gamification aspects, too. I'd love to let third-party sites to award badges or "endorsements" and display them on my profile page. This could work in all kinds of trust/credibility situations.

@benpate@mastodon.social said in Anyone building a federated Stack Overflow?:

Personally, the "accepted answer" is the killer feature. Dunno if NodeBB, Kbin, or others already support this.

Yes! NodeBB's been around for a decade, we have tons of stuff that got built because people wanted it.

So yeah we have a plugin that already does full question-and-answer support. We use it on our forum: https://community.nodebb.org/category/16/technical-support

Note the "solved" and "unsolved" labels, and descending into a solved topic, you'l see the accepted answer floated to the top.

NodeBB's theme and plugin engine is very flexible, so it is feasible to stand up a StackOverflow clone rapidly.

@benpate @utzer @dansup

But an emerging feature of "fedi" is that you can take your identity everywhere
Taking your identity everywhere and having access to all of the features offered somewhere else are different things, though.

Like, you can post to Lemmy groups from Mastodon-based websites, but you don't get the forum or content-aggregator features like post titles, cross-posting, etc. And you can communicate with people on Misskey or Friendica or Hubzilla, but that doesn't mean you can do everything that people using sites based on those platforms can do. Or you can comment on Wordpress blogs, but that doesn't mean that you can post to them.

You can interact with everything, but that doesn't mean anywhere else has to treat you like a first class user.