PieFed communities have a setting that can turn them into stackoverflow. https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1523157/what-if-stack-overflow-except-federated
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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There’s a lot of people who come to fedi looking for this spot — maybe it makes sense to see if programming.dev is willing to host such a community?
It would make sense on piefed, since you can mark responses as “answers”
The Software Engineering Stackexchange has a broader remit than Stackovrrflow, but still has the requirement that questions are not purely opinion based
Though regular StackOverflow has started to allow opinion based questions via a poorly labeled type dropdown on the question form. The active community hates it, but the company is going forward with it anyway because they want to be more like reddit without the slop problems
The company is going forward with it because the "active community" killed their site and now they have no choice.
If they had done it before AI became a viable alternative they might still have some users.
Don't most languages or frameworks have community boards? Maybe not the mailing lists more like old school forums
As unfortunate as that is, most of these seem to have dwindling user numbers since the emergence of LLMs. Users just don't ask on boards when they can ask an AI (and get a potentially wrong or unhelpful response).
SO in particular had it's question volume drop by I think like 90% or something in recent months/years. I don't remember the exact numbers, but search the net or associated communities here for details. Shouldn't be hard to find.
I have found a few communities on Matrix that fit that bill to some extent. For some reason they don’t devolve to “general chat” as quickly as most software related Discord servers do, in my experience.
Maybe here on the fediverse? Community possibilities are pretty broad, and you could even create your own.