this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Any interest in hosting q&a style programming communities?

@meta

See: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/112416604462962336

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

tbh all of the communities hosted on our instance should already be valid/viable alternatives:

  • in the sense that anyone can ask a question and potentially get answers from fellow fedi members

If we're missing something that Stack Overflow has that would make or break the experience, definitely feel free to add them to this comment or the Sublinks Repo

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yep, I've been actively promoting programming.dev any time the topic of StackOveflow has come up.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Q&A boards on reddit functioned thanks to flairs, [answered], [open], etc. Programming adds the value to also specifying a language in question. Lemmy devs promised they'd eventually impliment them. I see that change doesn't block one from creating specific communities (and I already asked questions and got answers on existing ones), but I see them bringing the closest experience to what I feel you want on Lemmy, without making a separate solution.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You can edit post titles on Lemmy, so yeah we could just put [unanswered] and [answered] in the title

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I've already been putting SOLVED on questions when I've found a solution, as I saw some other sites doing that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I feel like there's a missing fediverse product for this.

And by "missing" I mean popular, because I'm sure it exists already.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

now that Lemmy is working on supporting plugins soon, I think this could all be done inside Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

@sik0fewl I think Lemmy can do most the job.

But we’re missing an instance dedicated to that, a place people can port their S.O. answers to, and start building language or domain specific communities

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But we’re missing an instance dedicated to that

There are instances already for:

What we need is to have people using them and willing to feed it with content.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

@rglullis posting content (news about a programming language, frameworks and related tooling) to a particular forum doesnt make it useful as a Q&A, that is largely what I see in most cases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Community creation is open for all users, you are free to create a community dedicated to Q&A if you want a community explicitly for it. The admin team is willing to help out with moderation if that is what's holding you back.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Most of these niche communities lend itself for community support and discussion around specific problems. There is only so much "news" that can be had around specific topics.

I usually favor bias towards action in these cases: there is nothing bad about just posting questions to a specific community (e.g, Python) and until it starts becoming a problem. When/if people complain about the excessive number of Q&A posts, two things could happen:

  • The "I'm here for the news" people are in the majority, and the minority will then go to create an alternative "Q/A" community, like python-help or something.
  • The "I'm here for the news" people are in the minority, and they will either unsubscribe or create a separate "news-only" community, like python-planet.

Anyway, I'm all for the idea of using Lemmy for Q/A communities and I'd rather we have people pushing for it than waiting for some "idealized" version.