Unlock the Power of the Open Social Web with Flipboard's Surf
Original App vs. New App: A Paradigm Shift
The company's original app enabled users to gather content from various sources such as blogs, news websites, and traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This allowed them to create curated magazines. However, the newly launched app, Surf, which is now in invite-only beta, takes a different approach. It enables users to browse and explore the open social web, encompassing services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as other public web content like blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos. This shift represents a major step forward in providing users with a more diverse and expansive social media experience.Surf supports open protocols like RSS, which offers feeds for updates from websites and podcasts. It also integrates with Bluesky's newer AT Protocol and ActivityPub, which powers decentralized X competitor Mastodon, along with other platforms like Pixelfed, PeerTube, Friendica, and Ghost. This integration allows for a seamless connection between different social media services and the open web.
According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in development for nearly two years. The goal was to address the challenges users face when they decide 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. "It lets you browse any feed on the social web, whether it's ActivityPub, AT Proto, or RSS. People have their profiles, which are feeds you can surf. Hashtags are also feeds, and searches can be a feed."
Custom Feeds: Tailoring the Social Web Experience
What makes Surf truly powerful is the ability to build custom feeds by combining sources of one's own choosing. For example, if you're interested in AI model development or mountain biking, you can combine feeds that include the people you want to follow, real-time searches, keywords, popular hashtags, specific RSS feeds for websites and blogs you like, favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, and more.The app comes with around 30,000 pre-defined topics that can be combined and configured. Even if you add people or websites that post about various subjects, you can use the "Keep Feed on Topic" option in the custom feed's settings. This automatically filters out any news or posts that are not related to your area of interest.
You and other contributors can further configure the feeds to include or exclude replies, reposts, or mature content. You can also change the order in which the feed is displayed. Additionally, custom feeds can support multiple topics. Initially, this is done by using "AND" to create a custom feed that combines two topics. Later, you'll be able to curate feeds using "OR" to expand your options.
Diverse Viewing Options: Enhancing the Browsing Experience
As you browse a feed, there are multiple ways to view it. The "Discuss" tab offers a Twitter-like timeline experience, where posts from different social networks and sites are featured. You can like, reply to, repost, and bookmark posts when logged in with your Mastodon credentials. Support for Bluesky login will be available in a few weeks.You can also browse the feed using other tabs such as "Watch," "Read," "Listen," and "Look." These tabs allow you to filter the feed to show only videos, news articles, podcasts, and photos, respectively. In the "Watch" mode video view, browsing the feed feels similar to scrolling through TikTok.
Feed owners can choose which tab is the default for their feed. This gives them more control over how their content is presented and accessed by users. The app's versatility in providing different viewing options makes it suitable for a wide range of user preferences and needs.
Community Reunification: Bridging the Gap
Surf has proven particularly useful in situations where a community has become fragmented across multiple services. For instance, when users posting to the hashtag NBA Threads on Meta's Threads app faced moderation issues and had to move to Bluesky and Mastodon, Surf brought the community together by creating a custom feed that pulls in content from different services.This ability to unite communities across different platforms is a significant advantage of Surf. It allows users to stay connected and engaged with the content and people they care about, regardless of the service they are using.
Integration with the Open Social Web
While Surf was being developed, Flipboard was also integrating its magazine app with the open social web, also known as the fediverse. This involved connecting it with more open services like Mastodon and Bluesky."These existing experiences that have been made open are like the first wave of the social web," explains McCue. "Now, we're entering the next wave, which is about imagining completely new user experiences based on the power of the social web." This integration opens up new possibilities and expands the reach of Flipboard's platform.
Currently, Surf is in an invite-only, closed beta. The first testers are likely to be those who are interested in building feeds, such as those who have already created custom feeds or Starter Packs on Bluesky or Twitter/X Lists. The app is initially available on iOS and Android on an invite-only basis during beta testing and will later be available on the desktop web.