Flipboard Unveils Surf, a Revolutionary App for Browsing the Open Social Web

Jordan Vega

Jordan Vega

December 18, 2024 · 4 min read
Flipboard Unveils Surf, a Revolutionary App for Browsing the Open Social Web

Flipboard, the popular social magazine app maker, is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web with the launch of its new app, Surf. Currently in invite-only beta, Surf marks a significant shift in the company's approach, moving away from curated magazines to a more open and decentralized platform.

Unlike its predecessor, Surf allows users to browse and explore the open social web, which includes services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as other public web content like blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more. The app supports open protocols like RSS, ActivityPub, and AT Protocol, making it a browser for the social web.

According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in development for almost two years to solve 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."

On the app's home page, Flipboard's editorial team offers a variety of pre-made feeds to follow, organized into sections like Featured, Trending, Expert Voices, Communities, and others. However, what makes the app powerful is that users can also build their own custom feeds that combine sources of their own choosing. For instance, users can combine feeds that include the people they'd like to follow, real-time searches, keywords, popular hashtags, specific RSS feeds for websites and blogs they like, favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, and more.

The app comes with some 30,000 pre-defined topics that users can combine and configure. Users can also further configure the feeds to include or exclude replies, reposts, or mature content, and change how the feed will be ordered. Custom feeds can also support multiple topics, if desired.

As users browse a feed, there are multiple ways to view it. A "Discuss" tab offers a Twitter-like timeline experience where posts from across social networks and sites are featured, which users can also like, reply to, repost, and bookmark, when logged in with their Mastodon credentials. Users can also browse the feed by other tabs, "Watch," "Read," "Listen," and "Look," if they filter the feed to show only videos, news articles, podcasts, and photos, respectively.

The app can be particularly useful for those times when a community has become fractured across multiple services. With Surf, the community has been reunited by way of a custom feed that pulls in content from different services. 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.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue explains that the company is now entering the next wave of the social web, where new kinds of user experiences are being imagined 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 shift in the social media landscape, as more companies are moving towards open and decentralized platforms. With its focus on the open social web, Surf has the potential to change the way users interact with social media and discover new content.

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