Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for a new era of the open social web. The company's original app, which allowed users to curate content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter to create a curated magazine, is today launching an invite-only beta. Launching Edition A new app called Surf lets users browse and explore the open social web instead. This includes services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as other public web content such as blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos.
Surf uses open protocols like RSS, which provides a feed of updates from websites and podcasts, Bluesky's new AT protocol, ActivityPub, which powers decentralized X competitor Mastodon, as well as Pixelfed, PeerTube, Friendica, and Ghost. It supports and integrates with etc. with Meta's own X competitor Instagram Threads.
According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf is designed to solve many of the problems users face when they want to leave large, centralized social media services in favor of social media services built on open protocols. , has been in development for almost two years.
“Under the hood, it's a browser for the social web,” McCue says. “[Surf] This allows you to browse any feed on the social web, including ActivityPub, AT Proto, and RSS. ” he continues. “Of course people have profiles, and those are feeds that they can surf. There are hashtags that are feeds. Searches can be feeds.”
On the app's home page, Flipboard's editorial team offers a variety of ready-made feeds to follow, categorized into sections such as Featured, Trending, Expert Voices, and Community.
Image credit: Flipboard/Surf
But what makes this app so powerful is that you can build your own custom feeds from a combination of sources of your own choosing.
For example, if you want to follow a specific topic, such as AI model development or a hobby like mountain biking, you can combine the people you want to follow, real-time search, keywords, popular hashtags, and feeds with specific information. RSS feeds for your favorite websites and blogs, favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, and more.
Additionally, Surf provides many features to better configure and control the custom feeds you design.
The app comes with around 30,000 predefined topics that you can mix and match. Even if you add people or websites that post on different subjects, you can go to your custom feed settings and toggle on the “Keep a feed on topic” option.
This prevents news and posts from appearing in your feed that aren't related to the topics you're interested in.
Image credit: Flipboard/Surf
You (and other posters if you wish) can also reply, repost, further configure your feed to include or exclude adult content, and reorder your feed. .
Custom feeds can also support multiple topics if needed. (Initially, you create a custom feed that combines two topics using “AND.” However, Flipboard notes that later on, you'll be able to curate your feed by entering this “OR.” ).
When you browse your feed, there are also multiple ways to view it.
The Discussions tab provides a Twitter-like timeline experience featuring posts from social networks and across the site, and if you're logged in with your Mastodon credentials, you can like, reply, and replay. You can also post and bookmark. (Support for Bluesky login will be available in the coming weeks).
Image credit: Surf screenshot
However, you can also browse your feed in the other tabs Watch, Read, Listen, and Watch if you want to filter your feed to only show videos, news articles, podcasts, and photos, respectively. Masu.
In video view in Watch mode, browsing your feed is a lot like scrolling through TikTok.
Feed owners can choose which of these will be the default tab for their feed.
This app is especially useful when your community is fragmented across multiple services, like posting to the hashtag NBA Threads in Metas' Threads app. Some people left Threads for Bluesky and Mastodon due to Meta moderation issues. As a result, users now have to rely on multiple apps to follow communities.
Surf reunited the community with a custom feed that pulls in content from a variety of services.
Image credit: Surf screenshot
Alongside building Surf, Flipboard was 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.
“Opening up these existing experiences was like the first wave of the social web,” McCue explains, referring to the updates his company made to Flipboard. “I think we're now entering the next wave… of imagining entirely new kinds of user experiences we've never seen before, based on the power of the social web.”
Surf is currently in an invite-only closed beta, and the first testers are likely interested in building feeds, as they have already built custom feeds, Bluesky starter packs, Twitter/X lists, etc. It will be people. .
The app was initially available on iOS and Android by invitation only during beta testing, and will later be made available on desktop web.