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Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta today, will instead allow users to browse and explore the open social web. This includes services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as other public web content like blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more.
To work, Surf supports open protocols like RSS, which provides feeds for updates from websites and podcasts, Bluesky’s newer AT Protocol, and ActivityPub, which powers decentralized X competitor Mastodon, plus Pixelfed, PeerTube, Friendica, Ghost, and others, and is integrated with Meta’s own X competitor, Instagram Threads.
According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in development for almost two years to solve many of the problems users face when they want to leave larger, centralized social media services in favor of those built with open protocols.
“Under the hood, it’s a browser for the social web,” says McCue. “[Surf] lets you browse any feed on the social web, whether it’s ActivityPub, AT Proto, or RSS,” he continues. “People, of course, have their profiles — those are feeds that you can surf. There are hashtags that are feeds. Searches can be a feed.”
On the app’s home page, Flipboard’s editorial team offers a variety of pre-made feeds to follow, organized into sections like Featured, Trending, Expert Voices, Communities, and others.
But what makes the app powerful is that you can also build your own custom feeds that combine sources of your own choosing.
For instance, if you wanted to follow a specific topic, like AI model development, or a hobby like mountain biking, you could combine feeds that include the people you’d like to follow, real-time searches, keywords, popular hashtags, specific RSS feeds for websites and blogs you like, favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, and more.
Plus, Surf gives you a number of features to better configure and control the custom feeds you design.
The app comes with some 30,000 pre-defined topics you can combine and configure. Even if you add people or websites that post about a range of different subjects, you can go into your custom feed’s settings and toggle on an option to “Keep Feed on Topic.”
This automatically filters out any news or posts that aren’t about your subject of interest from appearing in the feed.
You — and optionally, other contributors — can also further configure the feeds to include or exclude replies, reposts, or mature content, and change how the feed will be ordered.
Custom feeds can also support multiple topics, if desired. (Initially, this will be by using “AND” to create a custom feed that combines two topics. But later, you’ll be able to curate feeds by saying this “OR” that, Flipboard says).
As you browse a feed, there are multiple ways to view it, too.
A “Discuss” tab offers a Twitter-like timeline experience where posts from across social networks and sites are featured, which you can also like, reply to, repost, and bookmark, when logged in with your Mastodon credentials. (Support for Bluesky login will arrive in a few weeks.)
However, you can also browse the feed by other tabs, “Watch,” “Read,” “Listen,” and “Look,” if you filter the feed to show only videos, news articles, podcasts, and photos, respectively.
In the “Watch” mode video view, browsing the feed feels a lot like scrolling TikTok.
Feed owners can choose which of these is the feed’s default tab.
The app can be particularly useful for those times when a community has become fractured across multiple services, as was the case with those posting to the hashtag NBA Threads on Metas’ Threads app. Some people left Threads for Bluesky and Mastodon after Meta’s moderation issues, which meant users now had to turn to multiple apps to follow the community.
With Surf, the community has been reunited by way of a custom feed that pulls in content from different services.
As Surf was being built, Flipboard was also integrating its magazine app with the open social web, also known as the fediverse, by connecting it with more open services like Mastodon and Bluesky.
“These existing experiences that have been made open — that’s been like the first wave of the social web,” McCue explains, referring to the updates his company made to Flipboard. “Now, I think we’re entering the next wave…which is imagining completely new kinds of user experiences that we’ve never seen before, based on the power of the social web.”
Surf is currently in an invite-only, closed beta, where the first testers will be those who are likely interested in building feeds because they’ve already built things like custom feeds or Starter Packs on Bluesky, or Twitter/X Lists, for example.
The app is initially available on iOS and Android on an invite-only basis while in beta testing, but will later be available on the desktop web.
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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
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