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Flipboard’s Surf app is a feed reader for the fediverse
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Flipboard’s Surf app is a feed reader for the fediverse

Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard and an Internet entrepreneur since the days of Netscape, truly believes in the fediverse. He doesn’t like that word: he much prefers to call it “the social web.” But whatever you want to call the open, decentralized, interconnected social networking experience that apps like Mastodon and Bluesky promise, McCue is absolutely convinced that it’s the future.

Over the past year or so, McCue and his team have completely overhauled the Flipboard platform to integrate it with the social web. Once the change is made, Flipboard will be a completely decentralized way to discover and read content on the Internet. The process seems to be going well, although it doesn’t seem ready to take over the fediverse like Threads could if it opened up completely.

At the same time, the Flipboard team is working on something even bigger. That something is an app called Surf (not to be confused with the recently launched Surf), which McCue called “the world’s first browser for the social web.” He first told me this a little over a year ago, when Surf was basically just a bunch of mockups and a deck of slides. Now the app has been in beta for a few months – I use it most of the time – and a public beta launches today. Not everyone can enter; McCue says he wants to bring in curators and creators first, so there will be plenty in Surf when everyone has access. And he promises it will happen soon.

But wait, sorry, back to the whole “browser for the social web” thing. McCue’s best explanation of Surf’s Grand Theory is this: In a decentralized social world, the Internet will be less about websites and more about feeds. “You will not enter theverge.com and go to the website to The edgebut you can put “the edge” and access the ActivityPub feed to The edge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; each Bluesky Starter Pack is a stream; every creator you follow is just producing a stream of content.

Surf’s job, in this world, is to help you discover and explore all these flows. The app can see three types of feeds: anything from ActivityPub, which means things like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed; anything that comes from the AT protocol, which stands for Bluesky; and any RSS feed. You can search for feeds by topic, publisher, or creator; you can curate your own feeds by combining other feeds. And then you can share these feeds, which other people can combine and recombine. This is all a bit confusing. Just imagine a well-designed vertical-scrolling feed, somewhere between a Twitter timeline and Apple News. home page.

You can have any type of content in Surf, which means the app needs to perform well in absolutely everything.
Image: David Pierce / Surfing

A feed can consist of almost any type of content, which poses a tricky design problem for Surf. It should perform equally well as a social network, news app, video platform, and podcast player. Combining all of this in one place isn’t just the goal; that’s the whole problem. And it’s very difficult to do all these things well.

Personally, the most eye-opening moment of my Surf testing was how the app lets you automatically filter a stream. I created a feed that contains all my favorite content: my favorite podcasts, my must-watch blogs, some must-watch YouTube channels, and my favorite people on Bluesky. I can open this feed and see everything, in order, no matter what it is or where it came from. But I can also filter it to only show all videos in the feed or tap “Listen” to turn it into a podcast queue.

Surf isn’t yet a complete app for any of these uses, let alone all of them, but it’s already a pretty useful app for all sorts of media. It presents videos like an endless-scrolling TikTok feed, which is actually a pretty fun way to browse a YouTube channel. Posts with links are formatted like news, with large images and headlines. It’s not a particularly dense timeline scrolling experience, either – the whole thing feels more like Flipboard’s flippy magazines than the For You pages we’re used to.

Because it involves compiling a collection of disparate platforms into one, searching can be complicated: I found five profiles with my name and photo, for example, and it’s not obvious which one is the one you are looking for. Surf is also designed to be interactive, but right now it pretty much only works if you’re a Mastodon user and like Mastodon’s posts. For most other things, it’s either sort of broken or entirely broken. For now, and probably for some time, Surfing is going to be much better as a consumption tool than as a social tool.

McCue sees the social web as the start of a whole new Internet. He even uses metaphors from the old Web to explain these early products: the current era we’re in is like AOL back then, “a walled garden that contained all the innovation within the walled garden » ; Surfing is like old-school Yahoo, “a collection of feeds created by other people.” He wants to enable paid streams so publishers, creators and curators can make money on the platform. He has great ideas for custom designs for feeds, so they look more like homepages.

There is still a lot to build – not to mention a lot of protocols and tools to convince all the internet platforms and publishers to work with them. But I’ve been talking to McCue about it for two years now, and his conviction and optimism haven’t wavered. When I tell him that I’ve definitely been hesitant – that I was once fully committed to ActivityPub as a future, but am worried about seeing Bluesky expand on another protocol and hearing some of the problems that Threads and others encounter with ActivityPub – he just laughs. First, he says, this is always how it happens in these early phases. Second, this is what Surf is supposed to solve.

To prove his point, McCue opens a feed full of basketball content, created by David Rushing. Rushing was an important figure in the early NBA Threads, a community that became divided thanks to some of Threads’ moderation and community policies. Now people are posting with #nbathreads on Bluesky and elsewhere too. It’s complicated. But Surf, McCue says, can put everything back together. He begins scrolling through Rushing’s personalized feed: “You see posts from Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads all over the social web. If you post a podcast, if you post a YouTube video, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads, it will show up in that feed. Rushing can add or remove individual posts or even use Flipboard’s filtering systems to get rid of anything that seems political, mentions gaming, or whatever else he wants to do.

McCue is practically giddy as he scrolls through all this basketball content. That’s all, here. “Ultimately,” he says, “you just won’t care if something is on Threads: I don’t write you a separate email because you’re on Gmail, nor isn’t it?” People will use a lot of apps, there will be a lot of communities, and that’s good. “There are nerds on Bluesky, there are nerds on Threads. How can all the nerds come together? That’s the question on everyone’s mind – sorry, the social web – and Surf seems to be the best answer anyone has found so far.