Flipboard Surf
Flipboard's new app for browsing the open social web
412 followers
Flipboard's new app for browsing the open social web
412 followers
Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself. Surf weaves Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, RSS feeds, podcasts, and YouTube into something that wouldn’t have been possible until recently.
This is the 2nd launch from Flipboard Surf. View more
Surf Social Websites
Launched this week
Social websites unite conversations around everything from popular podcasts to shared interests and hobbies. Each social website is powered by a Surf feed, with sources, filters and moderation controlled by the creator. This new model decentralizes the value of social media, giving power back to the millions of independent creators and communities that, until now, have been stuck in walled gardens. Examples include verge.surf.social wired.surf.social and filmfeed.surf.social
Free
Launch Team / Built With
Raycast
I'm just back from the AtmosphereConf, where I traveled with @mmccue and Ryan Barret by overnight train to join others in work to decentralize the social web!
And now Mike and @marci_mccue are here to launch something that's been over a year in the making: Social Websites.
The idea should be familiar, but the implementation and the scale is what's new.
Now anyone can build and launch their own corner of the internet and pull in social content from @Bluesky , @Mastodon , @Pixelfed, @Threads (and more!) with familiar publishers like The Verge, Decoder, Vergecast, Version History, WIRED, Rolling Stone Politics, 404 Media, Shutdown Fullcast, The MMQB, Defector: Sports!, All Net, FilmFeed, and The Oregonian participating.
Making a Social Website
Using surf.social, anyone can make a Surf feed, publish it with a subdomain and launch it as their own social website.
Feeds can include sources from Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, YouTube, podcast services, blogs and newsletters (RSS). Users can also assign a community hashtag, allowing people to contribute to the feed simply by using the hashtag. They can also set filters and exclude profiles or terms to keep the conversation on topic.
More tools to customize (e.g., adding custom headers and colors) and manage feeds are coming soon. Most importantly, social websites can now be shared outside of Surf, with online communities or linked in websites.
The Android app is now available and the iOS app is coming soon.
Flipboard
@marci_mccue @chrismessina That was an awesome train ride. We spend a solid 24 hours talking about the open social web while watching the beautiful scenery of the Pacific Northwest rush past us.
@mmccue @marci_mccue @chrismessina How easy is it to migrate an existing community by pulling in RSS/hashtags from Bluesky/Mastodon, and what's the moderation workflow like to keep things on-topic?
Flipboard
@marci_mccue @chrismessina @swati_paliwal You can pull in any account on bluesky, mastodon or federated threads. You can also pull in hashtags, lists and starter packs. Here's a video of a talk I gave last weekend at the Atmosphere conference which demonstrates this in action: https://ionosphere.tv/talks/81Xovjr
Cue
This is a big unlock for independent creators and communities. Pulling together Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and RSS into one curated social website is exactly what the decentralized web has been missing. Are you seeing more traction from publishers or individual creators so far?
Flipboard
@dparrelli Both. One of my favorite things to do is to see all the super cool, super niche feeds being created. We have an internal slack channel that shows every feed being published to the web or bluesky and it's a blast to watch that. If you go to surf.social you can see some of these. There's a huge variety of feeds for fandoms, local regions, interests, hobbies, activities, industries, issues, bands, tv shows, etc. Meanwhile it's also exciting to see creators I love suddenly launching surf feeds. Today I was so psyched to see Secret Base make secretbase.surf.social. I think one of the most exciting areas that needs lots of discovery and community building is podcasts.
Love the idea of giving creators a real destination they own.
If I understand correctly, you still post on Bluesky or Mastodon and Surf just organizes and surfaces that — is that right? Wondering how discoverability works for a solo indie maker just starting out vs. established brands like The Verge.
Flipboard
@misbah_abdel Yes that's right. You're really just posting on the open social web and then those posts can be seen in lots of different compatible apps like Bluesky, Mastodon, Surf, Flipboard, Pixelfed, Skylight etc. Think of it like a phone. I can text you from my Pixel phone running android using AT&T and you can get that text on your iPhone running iOS on Verizon. If you decide one day to change your phone or your OS or your carrier you keep your phone number and I can still text you and you can still text me.
Social media doesn't work that way today. And phones didn't always work this way either. Back before "number portability" happened in 2003, if you changed from Verizon to AT&T you LOST YOUR PHONE NUMBER and you had to tell everyone you knew what your new number was otherwise they couldn't call you anymore. The government got smart and regulated that numbers should be portable but social media is still stuck in the dark ages. That means if a creator wants to leave an app like TikTok or Instagram they have to be willing to eave their entire audience behind. Same with users. Literally all of our online connections to each other are OWNED by the social media walled gardens. This is unacceptable and has drastically hampered the growth of the web.
The social web changes all that. There's now a standard for how people are connected to each other (ActivityPub and AT Proto). You can now post from any social web compatible app you want anytime you want and anyone can see your post from any compatible app they want. This include photos, long and short text, video, etc.
Now back to your question: how does an indie maker just starting out vs established brands get discoverability? That's the beauty of the social web. People who like your content will recommend you. Meta or YouTube can't downrank it. TikTok or X can't overrun it with rage bait. People recommend great content to other people who will enjoy it.
Surf is designed to be the ultimate platform for human recommendations so that any creator can get discovered based on the merits of the content they are making. And creators can build community around their content so that people can talk about it and share it with others.
@mmccue The phone number portability analogy is perfect — never thought about social graphs that way. So as an indie maker, my audience on the open social web is actually mine to keep regardless of which app they use to follow me. That changes how I think about building in public completely.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this. 🙏🏾
Happy launch day! The creator-controlled moderation is a really interesting part. How does the tooling for that work? Is it more about blocklists and filters, or something more advanced?
Flipboard
@krutytskyi yes part of what makes these feeds so good is what you don’t see in them. The feed owner can moderate by excluding users, domains, keywords, hashtags and topics. You can also keep a feed on topic which is super useful when you add lists or starter packs as sources. We’ll be adding a lot more capability for community building and moderation in the coming months.
Flipboard
@krutytskyi yes part of what makes these feeds so good is what you don’t see in them. The feed owner can moderate by excluding users, domains, keywords, hashtags and topics. You can also keep a feed on topic which is super useful when you add lists or starter packs as sources. We’ll be adding a lot more capability for community building and moderation in the coming months.
@mmccue Got it, the ability to exclude by domain and topic sounds like a powerful way to keep feeds focused. Appreciate the detailed response and best of luck with the launch
I like how it aggregates a creator's content and allows to filter it in different ways.
As a viewer, am I supposed to be able to interact with the content beyond viewing it? Like how am I supposed to comment. Do I have to go create a mastodon account to comment? And then a bluesky account to comment on the blusky posts? Or does surf handle all of that?
Flipboard
@cubeofcheese yes if you sign up for surf you will get a social web account which will let you reply, like, repost, follow anyone regardless of where they are posting from (I.e. Bluesky, mastodon, Pixelfed, Flipboard etc)
Of course if already have a Bluesky or mastodon account you can attach it to surf and just use that to interact with people and posts in these feeds.
Flipboard
Three years ago, when we first saw Mastodon and learned more about the open protocols it was built on, we realized how powerful a shared open social graph could be, putting the power of our connections back in the hands of people. We decided to join the movement and opened ‘federated’ Flipboard, sharing our editorial curation with the fediverse. Once we had integrated our backend with the social web it was time to rethink the front end. That's what lead to Surf.
After 2.5 years of development we’re finally launching Surf, a new kind of browser for a new kind of web: the open social web. Surf lets anyone easily discover, browse and make feeds on the social web which bring together people, podcasts, videos, newsletters, blogs, photos and more for whatever they're into. And because this is the social web, these feeds can be published to Bluesky or published as social websites that live outside of Surf. Already some amazing creators have launched sites like verge.surf.social, wired.surf.social, filmfeed.surf.social and allnet.surf.social. Social websites represent a whole new way for creators to build destinations for their communities around their content, without being owned and operated by the social media giants of today.
I especially want to thank @chrismessina for not only hunting for us but for being a source of inspiration for how these feeds and sites should work across identities and accounts on the social web. Super excited to hear what you think and answer any questions you have.
Flipboard
@abhra_das1 no technical knowledge required. We designed the experience to feel a lot like joining any other social network like instagram. Only behind the scenes you’re actually joining the whole open social web, not just a single app.