Social Magazine App Builder Flipchart reinvents itself for the new era of open social network. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter to create curated magazines, its new app called Surflaunching today as an invite-only beta, will allow users to browse and explore the open social web. This includes services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as other public web content like blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more.

To work, Surf supports open protocols like RSSwhich provides feeds of updates from websites and podcasts, The blue sky newer AT protocolAnd ActivityAdvertisingwhich powers the decentralized competitor Mastodonas well as Pixelfed, PeerTube, Friendica, Ghost and others, and is integrated with Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Topics.

According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in development for nearly two years to address many of the issues users face when wanting to abandon 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,” he continues. “Of course, people have their profiles – these are feeds that you can surf. There are hashtags that are feeds. Searches can be a stream.

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.

But what makes the app powerful is that you can also create your own custom feeds combining the sources of your choice.

For example, if you want to follow a specific topic, like developing AI models, or a hobby like mountain biking, you can combine feeds including the people you want to follow, real-time searches, keywords, popular hashtags, RSS Feeds for the websites and blogs you love, your favorite YouTube channels, podcasts and much more.

Additionally, Surf gives you a number of features to better configure and control the custom streams you design.

The app includes some 30,000 predefined topics that you can combine and configure. Even if you add people or websites that post on a range of different topics, you can go to your custom feed settings and enable the “Keep feed on topic” option.

This automatically filters any news or posts that do not relate to your topic of interest from appearing in the feed.

You (and optionally other contributors) can also further configure feeds to include or exclude replies, reposts, or adult content, and change how the feed will be categorized.

Custom feeds can also support multiple topics, if desired. (Initially this will be done by using “AND” to create a custom feed combining two topics. But later you can organize feeds by saying This “OR” thatsays Flipboard).

When browsing a feed, there are also multiple ways to view it.

A “Chat” tab provides a Twitter-like timeline experience where posts from social networks and sites are showcased, which you can also like, reply to, repost, and favorite when logged in with your Mastodon credentials . (Bluesky login support will arrive in a few weeks).

However, you can also browse the feed via other tabs, “Watch”, “Read”, “Listen” and “Watch”, if you filter the feed to only show videos, news articles, podcasts and photos, respectively.

In the “Watch” mode video view, scrolling through the feed is a lot like scrolling through TikTok.

Feed owners can choose which of these tabs is the default tab for the feed.

The app can be particularly useful in times when a community is divided into multiple departments, as was the case for those posting to the NBA Threads hashtag on Metas’ Threads app. Some people left Threads for Bluesky and Mastodon after Meta moderation issues meant users now had to turn to multiple apps to keep up with the community.

With Surf, the community was brought together through a personalized feed that pulls content from different services.

As Surf built, Flipboard also integrated its magazine app into the open social web, also known as fediverse, connecting it to more open services like Mastodon and Bluesky,

“These existing experiences that have been made open, it’s like the first wave of the social web,” McCue says, referring to the updates his company made to Flipboard. “Now I think we’re entering the next wave… which is about imagining completely new types of user experiences that we’ve never seen before, 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 creating streams because they have already created things like custom streams or starter packs on Bluesky, or lists Twitter/X, for example. .

The app is initially available on iOS and Android by invitation only during beta testing, but will later be available on desktop web.