In a move to reinvent itself for the era of the open social web, Flipboard has launched a new app called Surf. Surf, which is currently in invite-only beta, aims to provide users with a seamless way to browse and explore the decentralized social landscape, including services like Mastodon, Bluesky, and other open protocols.
"Under the hood, it's a browser for the social web," explains Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. Surf supports a range of open protocols, including RSS, Bluesky's AT Protocol, and ActivityPub, which powers decentralized platforms like Mastodon, Pixelfed, and PeerTube.
One of the key features of Surf is the ability to create custom feeds that combine content from various sources, including people, hashtags, searches, RSS feeds, and more. Users can fine-tune these feeds to focus on specific topics, exclude certain content, and even control the order in which posts are displayed.
"People, of course, have their profiles — those are feeds that you can surf. There are hashtags that are feeds. Searches can be a feed," McCue elaborates.
Surf also offers different viewing modes, including a "Discuss" tab that provides a Twitter-like timeline experience, as well as "Watch," "Read," "Listen," and "Look" tabs for filtering the feed to show only videos, articles, podcasts, or photos, respectively.
The launch of Surf comes as Flipboard has been actively integrating its magazine app with the open social web, connecting it with services like Mastodon and Bluesky. According to McCue, this is just the beginning of a new wave of user experiences that will emerge from the power of the decentralized social web.
"These existing experiences that have been made open — that's been like the first wave of the social web," he explains. "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 available on an invite-only basis for iOS and Android users, with plans to expand to the desktop web in the future. The app is targeting early adopters who have already built custom feeds or "Starter Packs" on platforms like Bluesky, or who have used Twitter/X Lists to curate their social media experience.
As the open social web continues to evolve, Surf represents an exciting new way for users to navigate and explore this decentralized landscape, offering a personalized and powerful browsing experience.
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