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General community for all things mathematics on @lemmy.world

Submit link and text posts about anything at all related to mathematics.

Questions about mathematical topics are allowed, but NO HOMEWORK HELP. Communities for general math and homework help should be firmly delineated just as they were on reddit.

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Open source Math exchange alternative (math.codidact.com)

submitted 2 years ago by Artisian to c/math

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Recently noticed this open source math exchange-like site. The community is pretty slow (seems like there's lots of people interested in answering questions, but not so many posting them), which may make it a good target if you've got a good question that isn't getting the attention you'd like.

Curious if anybody knows other alternatives.

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[–] solrize 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That looks like a dubious stack exchange fork, though I didn't examine it closely.

[–] Artisian 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think your point is that it's a rip-off stack exchange, which is correct. The difference is that the code is open (which means, for example, you can host your own). In the sense of fork as in github and code repositories, I think no. Stack exchange is closed source, so this was recoded from the ground up (see this SE question )

If you value open source and portability, that's up to you. I will say Reddit hasn't been great recently...

[–] solrize 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had thought that stack exchange was originally open source and maybe still is. That is how math overflow was able to start. Either way though, the code is almost meaningless, as is the reddit code. Reddit has been reimplemented many times. The captive asset at reddit and stack exchange is the data and community (plus SE's crazy interpretation of the creative commons license where to republish stuff you have to SEO for them, even though they are not the author). It sounds like codidact may be repeating the same error/trick/whatever.

No I don't see codidact as a rip-off of SE since SE itself is a rip-off of its participants. The upsurge in Lemmy and outrage at Reddit is because Reddit just ramped up its rip-off intensity. SE did too, though less visibly.

[–] Artisian 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems like you might understand better than me the 'choose the liscence your question/answer is posted under' feature at Codidact then. Care to expound/point me to the game?

[–] solrize 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I didn't even notice that feature, but it's not about the licensing of individual answers, but rather about the availability of the dataset in bulk for those who want it. That was one of the founding promises of Wikipedia and though they had some rough spots delivering on it, they have mostly done a reasonable job of it and still do. Of course the goal of that promise was to permit migrating or forking Wikipedia's editor community, and that has been messed up in other unrelated ways, but the data is still available.

With Lemmy it's less clear whether there are institutional promises, but there are is at least (for now) an informal expectation that federated sites will keep the ActivityPub API open. Tons of other sites (cough, reddit) started with open API's until closing them meant more money. I don't know if StackExchange or Codidact have that, or whether it is as important.