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Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

How difficult it would be to build a decentralised SO?

I know it's the valuable knowledge base and contributing users that will be missing in our new service but we gotta start somewhere.

I guess it would be easier to onboard Software developers on a decentralised service than general public.

Some ideas for this service:

1. Users can choose to keep knowledge base locally for topic of their interests

2. A terminal based interface for quick answers

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I guess the difficult part is not the technology, it's not like SO is doing anything too fancy on that front. But the community, growing and getting people to answer questions, that's something we'd have expected FSF to grow, but somehow that community couldn't.

I agree that building a community is very hard, but at least there are success stories to look at. I can't name any successful, Google-accessible decentralized system.

> How difficult it would be to build a decentralised SO?

Q&A platforms are widely available, and they could easily support federated/decentralized use cases via ActivityPub. So building a decentralized platform is mostly about creating these communities and enabling them to federate with one another.

In reading another current HN post I was reminded that for a long time, this was known as USENET.

Every time I search for an answer to a technical question, and I end up on a mailing list post, I get the old great/damn response: Great, that's my question! Damn, will it actually be accompanied by an answer??

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