After TikTok's ban went into effect on Sunday, social network Bluesky launched a custom feed of videos on its platform. Now, Flipboard's newest app, Surf, which specializes in browsing the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of the movement and introducing its own video feed.
Initially, Surf's video feed was a combination of video posts on Bluesky's “trending videos” feed and posts with the hashtag #SkyTok. The company says it plans to personalize the feed for end users in the near future.
This will help you differentiate between Surf's video feed and Bluesky's video feed. It also represents the power you gain by allowing third parties to build your social networking platform's feeds. Surf is currently in beta, with a sign-up list available for interested testers.
“This is how custom feeds on the social web can be used for all kinds of use cases that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of big walled gardens, like video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, and messaging. It's just the latest example of what can be done,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. “It's still early days, but things are moving very quickly, especially with AT Proto.” [the protocol that powers Bluesky.]”
To personalize the new Surf video feed, McCue said the company will soon add a user's Bluesky Following timeline (another custom feed) as a source for the feed. This will also be filtered to only show video posts. Once this last step is complete, videos from people you follow will appear in your feed.
After Bluesky on Sunday shipped a native custom video feed with a new TikTok-style user interface, Surf also adopted that design for its feed. (Note: If you don't see the TikTok-style interface in Bluesky, try restarting the mobile app a few times.)
Image credit: Screenshot of Surf's BookTok feed
If you don't have access to Surf, which is still in private beta, you can use its feed directly in Bluesky. Surf has integrated a new custom video feed into Blueksy, making it available as a separate native custom feed option.
Image credit: Surf's BookTok feed (when viewed on Bluesky)
McCue points out that Surf itself can also be used to create different types of video feeds.
For example, it has also built a “BookTok”-type feed that focuses on users discussing books in videos, similar to TikTok's BookTok community. This feed can be viewed in both Surf and Bluesky.
To create this feed, McCue included all videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
However, these tags can also exist in other apps besides Bluesky, so when you use the feed in Surf itself, in addition to videos from Bluesky, you can also see videos from other services like YouTube, Threads, Mastodon, etc. It will be possible to display it. This is possible because Surf allows users to explore multiple social networks within the app. This includes networking using protocols such as ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.