Since the controversies of last year I've been participating less and less, and it looks like other people are doing the same. Part of it is inertia -- less activity and fewer familiar faces means less reason to come. Part of it is the company mistreating people and not correcting that. But Mi Yodeya is an amazing community where I personally invested a lot of time and I hate to see this happen to us.
Last week I got an update from the Codidact mailing list. They're hosting other communities now. Is it time to try a Judaism community there?
Codidact has several points in its favor:
They explicitly say that they put communities first. They don't have stockholders (non-profit). The code is open source.
They aim to not mistreat their users and volunteers and operate transparently. “Our” Monica is a lead there and I trust her ethical standards.
We can import questions and answers from Mi Yodeya. That's allowed by the CC license and I see some of the Codidact communities have started to do it (e.g., see here and note the gray box below the question). We can decide what to import -- high-value posts, certain tags, most open questions with positive scores, anything in between.
Their code has features we could benefit from that are impossible on SE. We could have a place to post divrei Torah if we wanted. We could better manage Purim Torah. We could customize a lot of the site settings. They are moving away from reputation and toward a system of trust levels, so you don't suddently get privileges you don't know how to use based on one hot question.
This isn't either/or. There's no reason people couldn't participate on both sites and I would also plan to do so. Codidact seems to have a lot to offer and it seems they're happy to work with communities to meet their needs.
A community is more than a platform. People to participate are essential. Of course it is always harder to start something new than leverage the existing platform but I see quite some benefits.
Would people here be interested in giving it a try? If yes, I’d be happy to start a meta post on Codidact to discuss what features we might want to adapt, what content we would like to import and other topics of importance to the community.
UPDATE: there is a now a meta post on Codidact to take this discussion further
SIGNIFICANT UPDATE: following the enthusiastic reception here, the Judaism site has been created at Codidact. Mazal tov !