this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Free and Open Source Software

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If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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Welcome to Codidact, the community-run, open-source Q&A platform. We're working together to build communities around high-quality, peer-reviewed questions, answers, articles, and other content. Codidact puts people first; we're here to help you share knowledge and get curated answers in a friendly environment.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

Probably worth mentioning that another alternative called TopAnswers.xyz exists as well—both Codidact and TopAnswers mention each other in their homepages, which I find pretty neat.

Definitely interested to see how both of these sites pan out. StackExchange has been a powerful force for good over the years, and it's been sad to hear it starting to slide down recently, not that I should be too surprised since they got bought four years back. I'm eager to see what a properly open-source and nonprofit community can do on the good template that SE once set.

I do wish either of these sites could host in a different country than the UK though; I've heard more than enough by now to feel that hosting a tech project in the UK is scarcely any better than doing so in the US, privacy-wise. (Though for that matter, TA uses Amazon for hosting, which is probably the worst of both worlds.)

[–] [email protected] 24 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

I would be interested in a project like this if it were a distributed network.

It's important to ensure that accumulated community knowledge will survive, and conversations can continue, when an instance dies or becomes intolerable. (Reddit and Stack Exchange have recently brought this into sharp focus.) It's so important that I no longer contribute to sites like this unless they provide those assurances.

So I hope this one develops into something that meets that need.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

This is a very fair point and I agree that a solid, proven assurance of information survivability is vital to something like this. Frankly, though, if StackExchange is shitting the bed (as it seems to be if GenAI is being accepted there) then I think it's important to get a good alternative running regardless. Still, that in turn makes it all the more important to keep the pressure up on the survivability issue so it doesn't get ignored.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

I'd also like to see something like this for the Internet Archive. Essentially a federated archive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Ugh, no. The internet archive doesn't care about consent enough as it is. Can you imagine how much harder it would be to get stuff taken down on a distributed network when it leads to harrassment etc?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

Yeah, but they're storing so much data only orgs with a lot of funding could participate, so it'd still be in the hands of wealthy parties.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

Something built with Hyphanet, maybe?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago

Well put and I couldn't agree more. Feels like I've been waiting for years for something to have that 'survival' problem solved