A place where answers stay

How it works

You are dealt a handful of questions rather than shown a box that says what's on your mind? Some you will want to answer. Most you will not, and passing is a real answer — a question you pass on is never dealt to you again.

When you do answer, the answer gets a permanent address. Come back in a year and change your mind, and the new version replaces the old one on your profile while the old one stays readable next to it. Nothing you write here is overwritten, and nothing expires.

You cannot read what other people said about a question until you have answered it or passed on it. This is not a paywall or a growth trick — it is the only way to know that an answer is yours rather than a reaction to the answer above it.

What it is not

There is no infinite scroll: the feed of people you follow stops, and tells you it has stopped. There is no like button. You get three hearts a day and they do not accumulate; you can give one, two or three of them to a single answer, and once they are gone they are gone until tomorrow. Every surface names who gave before it counts how many, and an answer's hearts are shown as one, two or three rather than as a total — so there is no number to run up. There is no ranking of people: the directory is sorted alphabetically, and there is no most-followed list, no trending, no leaderboard.

There are no streaks, no badges and no nudges telling you that you have not posted in a while. Answering four questions in a year is a perfectly good way to use this.

You can save any answer to your own list to read again. That list is private, it is not rationed, and nothing counts it — not on the answer, not for its author, not anywhere. It is the one thing here you do purely for yourself.

Profiles of people who have not joined

Some profiles here belong to public figures who have not joined FLAPSS and have not endorsed it. They are marked Managed — not claimed in a bordered block at the top of the page, not in a footnote.

Nobody answers as anybody on this site. Everything on a managed profile is a direct quotation of something that person actually said somewhere else — in a published interview, a lecture, a hearing — shown with the publication, the date and a link to the source. If a source cannot be given, the quotation is not published.

If one of those profiles is about you, it is yours to take over, correct or remove. The link is on the page itself and you do not need an account to use it. Removals are honoured without argument.

Who runs it

It is small, it is new, and it is not funded by advertising — which is why there is nothing here designed to keep you on the page. If something is wrong, or you need to reach a person about it, write to us. It goes to someone who reads it.

The terms describe what you can expect from us and what we ask of you. The privacy notice describes exactly what we hold and how to get it back or have it erased — including what erasure can and cannot undo on a site built around permanence.