Flipboard, the social magazine app maker, is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web with the launch of Surf, a new app that allows users to browse and explore the open social web. Surf, which is launching into invite-only beta today, marks a significant shift in Flipboard's approach, moving away from curated magazines and towards a more open and decentralized social experience.

Unlike Flipboard's original app, which allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter, Surf is designed to support open protocols like RSS, ActivityPub, and AT Protocol. This means that users can browse and explore content from a wide range of services, including Mastodon, Bluesky, and other public web content like blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more.

According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in development for almost two years, with the goal of solving 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."

One of the key features of Surf is the ability to build custom feeds that combine sources of the user's own choosing. This means that users can follow specific topics, hobbies, or interests, and combine feeds from a range of different sources, including people, real-time searches, keywords, popular hashtags, specific RSS feeds, favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, and more. The app comes with some 30,000 pre-defined topics that can be combined and configured, and users can also further customize their feeds to include or exclude replies, reposts, or mature content.

As users browse a feed, they can view it in multiple ways, including a "Discuss" tab that offers a Twitter-like timeline experience, as well as "Watch," "Read," "Listen," and "Look" tabs that filter the feed to show only videos, news articles, podcasts, and photos, respectively. Feed owners can choose which of these is the feed's default tab, and users can also like, reply to, repost, and bookmark posts when logged in with their Mastodon credentials.

The app can be particularly useful for those times when a community has become fractured across multiple services. For example, Surf can reunite a community by way of a custom feed that pulls in content from different services, as was the case with the hashtag NBA Threads on Meta's 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.

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. According to McCue, this marks a significant shift in the social web, from the first wave of open experiences to the next wave, which is imagining completely new kinds of user experiences 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.

The launch of Surf marks a significant moment in the evolution of the social web, as users increasingly look for more open and decentralized alternatives to traditional social media services. With its focus on supporting open protocols and allowing users to build custom feeds, Surf is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend and provide a new kind of social experience that is more flexible, customizable, and community-driven.