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What is the relationship between Codidact and TopAnswers?
(Apologies if this is a dupe. I couldn't find a way to search Meta questions.) I joined Codidact after hearing about it on Programming Puzzles & Code Golf (PPCG) Stack Exchange a few years ago, and being a supporter of open-source, community-driven software, particularly during the recent dilemma on Stack Overflow about AI-generated answers.
I first assumed Codidact to TopAnswers is analogous to Stack Exchange to Stack Overflow, i.e. run by the same company, but it seems to me now that Codidact is completely distinct from TopAnswers in codebase (https://github.com/codidact/qpixel vs https://github.com/topanswers/topanswers) and management. Thus software.codidact.com and topanswers.xyz both serve as distinct Stack Overflow alternatives, with TopAnswers being older and less active. Is this correct?
codidact.com only says
We also share a lot of goals (and some contributors) with a similar project, TopAnswers. You may also want to consider participating in the communities they have there:
followed by nothing (I think uBlock Origin accidentally hid it).
From the name, I also thought Software Development Codidact was more akin to Software Engineering Stack Exchange than Stack Overflow. This distinction is still a little hazy to me.
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Codidact and TopAnswers are independent projects, which share much of the same sentiment: a free and open source platform for Q&A with focus on the communities. I think their relationship can best described as being friends.
While the overall goals of the platforms are similar, the exact approaches sometimes differ. For example TopAnswers has a nicely integrated chat, which makes it well suited for topics which might require some back and forth discussion with the OP to find a suitable solution. That was one of the main reasons a couple of friends and I started a TeX community there. Codidact on the other hand is a bit more a traditional Q&A site (with a nice modern design), which makes it easier for people who are used to SE.
There is an overlap in the user base, myself included, and I've seen some other names pop up on both platforms.
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Codidact as a whole offers a platform that is an alternative to Stack Exchange as a whole. Each of these platforms determines its topics (at least in principle) according to user demand and initiative. There is no reason a priori to expect any kind of correspondence between SE sites and CD communities, and we are not in any way attempting to mirror or emulate Stack Exchange's organization. The scope of each community here is determined by the community, independently of what any other site on the Internet does. The scope of software.CD is overall broader than Stack Overflow - at least for now. The reasons for closing questions may be informed, however, by the community's prior experiences with Stack Overflow.
Topanswers bills itself as an alternative to Stack Overflow specifically. However, since it is organized into sections with specific topic focus, and the platform is open source, in principle nothing prevents reusing that software to discuss topics outside of software, to emulate specific SE sites, or to form the base of another whole-SE alternative like Codidact.
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