Request to migrate a question to Raspberry Pi declined

Question

I recently flagged a question to be migrated to Raspberry Pi.

Backup data rate on Raspberry Pi maxing out at 5 Mb/s. Why?

But it was declined with the following explanation.

don't really migrate to betas to allow them to organically plant their feet

I really don't think that this applies in this situation though as the Raspberry Pi site is currently 49 days into public beta. While the question was asked yesterday.

If this question was asked three months ago, before Raspberry Pi entered public beta I could see, and would even agree, with the reason behind it's decline.

However in this case, we have a brand new question asked on site A when it is more relevant to site B. Why not migrate it?

The same approach is taken with Code Review and Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow migrates questions that are on-topic for Code Review to them, even though they are still in public beta.

In conclusion, why not migrate? /rant

Answer 1

What the response means is that we generally don't migrate questions to beta sites at all, unless the question is already distinctly off-topic for Super User and specifically on-topic for that beta site.

New sites need to grow on their own accord. Poaching an established site is not an effective way to get new users. Furthermore, it is a very confusing user experience for the question asker when their question which was on topic is suddenly moved to a new site they've never seen before and may have no interest in participating in.

On Super User, we frown on migrating questions away if they're on-topic here. Flags requesting that questions be migrated to the Raspberry Pi site will be declined if the question is on-topic for Super User.

That being said, if you see a Raspberry Pi question that has been around for a while (like, several weeks) and has no answers, it's fine to leave a polite comment letting the question asker know that there's a site for that subject. But leave it up to them to request the migration - it's their choice to make.

Answer 2

In many respects, this question (and the response) goes to the heart of a concern I'm already developing over the SO family of sites and many of the Area51 proposals - fragmentation.

Yes, the RPi question would be more directly on-topic at RPi.SE(beta) than here. But (as the responses show) the "turf war" is already in place with the view that RPi questions are also on-topic here (and probably elsewhere too).

Likewise there are several A51 proposals relating to robotics (in one form or the other) when a combined Robotics proposal would make most sense.

Personally, I'd rather see a smaller number of well-scoped but broad-topic sites, than a bigger number of niche sites that will probably wither.

Answer 3

Raspberry Pi questions are perfectly on topic for Super User.

The question was only asked yesterday, so there's no need for a rush to migrate it out into a beta. If the user asking thought it should have been posted to Raspberry Pi instead, maybe.

Still, even then, public or private, it's a beta and if they want to survive as a site, they shouldn't be scavenging for posts from others.