Are we done with the Federated questions?

I asked on the contact section, and apparently the partnership is still there, but no longer advertised.

Fluther is owned by Twitter? I feel like the kid who’s found the bottom of the ball pit. :\

@Nullo It’s more like Twitter “acquired” the brains and workers who created Fluther. The site is not actually owned by Twitter.

@skfinkel—Speaking of that, did they ever offer a more in depth explanation after the holidays, like they said they were going to?

I’d still like some more information on this as well if possible… I read the blog but couldn’t really seem to get any idea of answers…and still fear the obvious… that the site will eventually dissipate :-( ALthough having said that as long as users are still here…will they promise to keep the site up? But…what happens if there is a glitch…if the site crashes… will they get it back up again?.... hmmmm…..

Andrew did say he was going to write a fuller explanation after the holidays @DrasticDreamer , but I haven’t seen it either.

@Nullo Read this blog post. It explains.

@skfinkel I hope “the brains and workers who created Fluther” are happy and doing well.

@janbb: They are!

Erm, what’s a “federated question”???

I was thinking the same thing but thought I’d just steam on in there anyway! lol

I think that Federated was still in beta and was only visible to some users.

For those who asked, it is discussed in this blog entry.

@marinelife sorry for being thick but I still don’t really get it… federated questions?... hmmm wait… beta? I don’t know what that is but I’m guessing that basically other question and Answer sites forwarded people to Fluther perhaps…if they asked a question that had been asked here? I don’t know… I don’t think I’ll ever understand as I think I was away when all of this happened… never mind..I’m here now anyway and just hope Fluther stays strong and alive x

@nebule – http://www.fluther.com/federated/

I’ll try to address some of these questions.

Federated Fluther is a way for any site (say, a restaurant review site) to have a Q & A section powered by Fluther. Questions asked on that site appear here, but only to our beta testers (a small group of users who get updates early, to work out the bugs in the system). In addition, questions asked here that meet the profile of that site would appear there, thus widening the possible pool of knowledgeable answers.

Federated still seems to be up and running on our partner sites, but we don’t get very many questions from them. I’m unsure if it will continue, or if it does, whether it will grow.
—————————————————————-
Twitter acquired the Fluther technical team (they are all now employees of Twitter), but not the site. Ben and Andrew retain ownership of Fluther, and I still work for Fluther. Our site is pretty much self-sustaining (we earn enough money to pay for the servers and for my salary), so it will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Fluther is still a labor of love for the founders, it’s just not their day job any more.

Fluther will continue to be supported (glitches worked on, etc), but not further developed (don’t expect any new bells and whistles). In the very unlikely event that the site crashes during the Twitter work day, there may be a delay in getting the site back up, but we have some volunteer back-up support. (We have never had a crash that wasn’t caused by implementing changes to the site. No new changes = no crashes.)

The guys have not updated us any further, but I think they’ll be posting something to the blog soon.
——————————————————————-
I hope I addressed everything. If I missed something, please let me know. Thanks!

@augustlan Thank you sweetie xxxx I get it now xx

I can’t imagine another site would use Federated Fluther now. If Fluther goes down it takes them down too. I sure hope Ben and Andrew communicated what happened with them.

Thanks @augustlan!! As ever, a calm voice explaining all! :-)

Maybe now twitter can improve. Like, a complete overhaul maybe