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.
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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.
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I hope I addressed everything. If I missed something, please let me know. Thanks!