I do like the idea of splitting in some way. But wonder whether it isn’t just too cosmetic to split the sites entirely. Possibly we need to consider it in a much grander scheme than what can be done with the current SE/SO website.
To compare it with living organisms. Whether a split is gonna ‘work’ depends on what creature you are talking about. If it is a human than a split in two will kill the human. However for cellular organisms splitting is daily (hourly) business. But, still, for cellular organisms you will have the effect that they can not split indefinitely and eventually they will die when they do not get new food. Also for something like trees (maybe wikipedia is like that) they will eventually die.
So, I would say that we should not try to have the organism (the site) survive at all costs by doing these kind of splits. But what we need is a mechanism for the DNA to survive.
While thinking about this split of Codidact over the last weeks, I have lost a bit my hopes for the concept of Q&A. Creating split offs seems to much like going along the same dead-end road (no clear evolutionary adaptations except change of governance) .
What would excite me is when the ‘content’ would be more portable, lightweight, and less dependent on the platform/substrate that it is living off. It is not about splitting, but about being able to switch.
If we wish to beat the wild yeast that SE/SO are then we need to find a way to adapt to their mistake of being solely a model that only lives while it is growing and dies otherwise. What I believe now is that some form of mutualism with a tree like wikipedia is neccesary (use all of the four answerers in one ecosystem)