Flipboard, the renowned social magazine app maker, is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. The company's latest innovation, Surf, is a groundbreaking app that enables users to browse and explore the open social web, marking a significant shift from its traditional content aggregation model.

Surf, which is launching into invite-only beta today, supports open protocols like RSS, ActivityPub, and Bluesky's AT Protocol, allowing users to access a vast range of content from decentralized platforms, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more. This move is a deliberate attempt to solve the problems users face when trying to leave larger, centralized social media services in favor of those built with open protocols.

According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in development for almost two years, with the primary goal of creating a "browser for the social web." The app's home page offers a variety of pre-made feeds to follow, organized into sections like Featured, Trending, Expert Voices, Communities, and others. However, what sets Surf apart is its ability to let users build their own custom feeds that combine sources of their own choosing.

Users can create custom feeds by combining feeds from people they'd like to follow, real-time searches, keywords, popular hashtags, specific RSS feeds for websites and blogs, favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, and more. The app also provides features to better configure and control the custom feeds, including the ability to filter out off-topic content, exclude replies, reposts, or mature content, and change the feed's ordering.

Custom feeds can also support multiple topics, with the option to use "AND" or "OR" operators to curate feeds. As users browse a feed, they can switch between different views, including a Twitter-like timeline experience, video, news articles, podcasts, and photos. Feed owners can choose which view is the feed's default tab.

The app's potential is particularly evident in cases where a community has become fractured across multiple services. For instance, users who left Meta's Threads app for Bluesky and Mastodon can now reunite through a custom feed that pulls in content from different services. Surf is currently available on iOS and Android in an invite-only, closed beta, with plans to expand to the desktop web in the future.

Flipboard's move into the open social web is a significant development in the tech industry, marking a shift towards more decentralized and community-driven platforms. As McCue notes, "These existing experiences that have been made open — that's been like the first wave of the social web. 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."

As Surf continues to evolve and expand, it will be interesting to see how it shapes the future of social media and online interactions. One thing is certain, however: Flipboard's bold move into the open social web is a game-changer, and Surf is an app that's definitely worth keeping an eye on.