I'm starting to see the parallels between Stack Overflow and James Blish's 'Cities In Flight' series. In those books the major Earth cities all rip themselves from the host planet and set off for a new life among the stars. Is this already happening as tags set off for new lives in the Stack Exchange galaxy?
I've just committed to the public beta of SharePoint Overflow and I guess that will mean that all new SharePoint questions will be migrated to this new Stack Exchange site; and I guess there will be a call to migrate all existing questions on SharePoint to the new site. So SharePoint will fire up its spindizzy and move a few thousand questions a month off the Stack Overflow planet.
In addition I noted this meta question asking for Scrum and agile Stack Overflow questions to be migrated to Programmers. Another spindizzy is started, hundreds of questions affected.
And this is inevitably happening more and more.
Agile, Scrum and SharePoint are middleweights in question terms — so small enough to be shrugged off. But what if the heavyweight tags get itchy? Say a mobile development Stack Exchange site took all iPhone, Objective-C and Android questions reducing the Stack Overflow questions by tens of thousands a month? What if a Microsoft development Stack Exchange site moved off, or Java or database?
So how long before all the big tags get a dedicated site and move off to live among the stars, leaving behind the disenfranchised, smaller tags to eke out an existence on the home planet?
NB: I can't see how this won't have been noticed already — but I couldn't see a duplicate.
EDIT
There is a case for moving subjective tags like agile to subjective Stack Exchange sites like Programmers — subjective questions don't sit well with Stack Overflow and are often promptly closed.
But while I can see that CMS Stack Exchange Communities would be useful, I would still like to see all coding questions centralized at Stack Overflow — even if that meant duplication between Stack Overflow and some Stack Exchange sites.