I’ve always thought of the StackExchange network as kind of a strange beast. In one sense, it is basically a Reddit clone. It has a “front page”, it has “karma”, it has “subreddits”, etc. And yet, it is something else entirely. Through strict moderation and constraining site rules, it has always maintained a separate niche from Reddit, despite being so conceptually similar.
I think there is a real possibility that StackExchange network is basically already compliant with the “threadiverse” protocol (ie the Lemmy/Kbin dialect of activitypub), or rather that the data model of their API could be made to be compliant with almost no effort at all. I think it would be really cool to see some of the questions and discussion threads that get created over there appearing over here. Even if it was a one-way connection, the idea of knitting these networks together is fascinating to me. I have no idea if it would make business sense for them, but then again I don’t actually know how StackExchange makes most of their money.
Why should Stack Overflow (part of Prosus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosus ) be welcomed when Meta / Threads is shunned for being a big corporate evil company?
Being shunned from the Fediverse for being a corporate (evil or not) company is an inherently bad way to think about the Fediverse.
The beauty of the Fediverse is that it’s open to everyone and free (minus hosting prices/your data) to join, if we suddenly say we’re banning every corporation, then we’re a bit of a joke of a platform as that’s the exact opposite intention. While defederation exists it’s a joke to assume every huge instance will decouple from every major corporation.
Yes it is not optimal that an application such as Threads can adopt the protocol, but generally unless they destroy the protocol itself (highly unlikely) it’ll only affect competitors in direct competition like Mastadon. Even whilst being affected the main user base should remain as it’s currently made up of like minded individuals who despise corporations, respect our data privacy etc
It is, but I would point to the consensus of people when it comes to federating with Meta and Threads. Much of the objection was focused around “Meta is a bad company and we don’t want the corporate entities to become significant players here.”
I would contend that Prosus is just as bad as Meta, though just less well known.
Those are exactly the people who should be aware of Prosus and their associated holdings.
There are a number of other reasons why it would be counterproductive for Stack Overflow to make their data available via ActivityPub.
I believe that if one does want to go down the Q&A path on ActivityPub, they should do it with ActivityPub in mind. We can see the “this doesn’t quite work” when doing “Mastodon is a twitter clone on ActivityPub” and “Lemmy is a reddit clone on ActivityPub” where things just don’t map right.
Just pushing content out is a poor model… and I would argue that Q&A as a durable knowledge store is a poor fit for ActivityPub as a means of exchanging data. Bolting ActivityPub on the side of StackOverflow, or trying to build a Q&A knowledge base on top of ActivityPub seem to be poor fits.
Q&A would need a good story for “why federation?” and a way to avoid ending up being Yahoo Answers and a way to differentiate itself from [email protected]