Instagram Threads isn’t the only app participating in the decentralized social web. The decentralized social web includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and other apps, and has added support for the new networking protocol ActivityPub. Currently, the social magazine app Flipboard is announcement It is also now integrated with ActityPub. In the initial phase, his selected Flipboard account will be discoverable and followable by millions of users on decentralized social apps, including Mastodon. Over time, all profiles on Flipboard will be available in the Fediverse, as this network of decentralized social apps is known.
The company announced its intention to join the Fediverse earlier this year. It started by integrating the app with His Mastodon via the API and setting up its own Mastodon server. flipboard.social, prior to full integration of ActivityPub. This gave Flipboard a feel for the world of decentralized social media and how users would react. It also gave Flipboard a way to stay connected to social media after Twitter/X increased API fees for third-party developers. unsustainable This is to allow more developers to continue working with the company.
The main purpose of the Flipboard app was to curate news and information from around the web into a social “magazine” that included links to articles, photos, and other social posts. As a result, we relied on Twitter as one of our sources of information. Things changed this year when Flipboard moved its Twitter integration to his Mastodon and another alternative social app, Bluesky. He also set up his own Mastodon server and began curating news from across the Commonwealth through an editorial “desk” focused on improving news discovery on Mastodon.
All of this is in preparation for making Flipboard itself a federated social app, a process that begins today.
Initially, Flipboard was launched by a select group of publishers, including Semafor, Pitchfork, Fast Company, Medium, LGBTQ Nation, Refinery 29, DIgiday, Polygon, SPIN, Kotaku, Frommer’s, The Verge, Smithsonian Magazine, Refinery 29, The Root, and more. Testing integration with your account. , ScienceAlert, AFAR Media, and more. Although many are news-focused, there are also several nonprofit organizations, including: News Literacy Project and education-focused news sites. 74, Among this debut list.
Image credits: flip board
“As we said earlier this year, we’re bringing ActivityPub to Flipboard and effectively reworking the entire backend to go with it,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said in a conversation with TechCrunch about the upcoming changes. explained. He said the company first integrated with his Mastodon at the API level, so users can log into their Mastodon accounts, see those posts from Flipboard, and interact with other users in the Fediverse. It is now possible. “But you had to have an account on all of these platforms,” McCue noted.
“What we’re announcing on Monday is essentially a roadmap for how to deploy ActivityPub and effectively tear down the walls of our own walled garden,” he said. added.
With this change, when a Flipboard user curates an article on the Flipboard app or posts it to one of our social magazines, with an optional comment, that “flip” (so-called “flip”) can be viewed on the new flipboard. com It will also appear as a post in your Mastodon account. . This is not the same server that his Flipboard previously set up (flipboard.social), which was a place to experiment with decentralized social media. Instead, the Flipboard app itself is now connected to fediverse. A user’s posts on Mastodon include links to both the article being flipped and the user’s Flipboard magazine, and the user’s profile shows her Flipboard profile page.
Image credits: flip board
Once this is rolled out, all Flipboard users will have one Flipboard.com account connected to fediverse, even if they host many Flipboard magazines. This is not ideal since their magazines may focus on different topics. But McCue believes Mastodon could one day support the concept of subfeeds, which would allow for further differentiation.
Users can opt out of having their “flips” posted to Mastodon, but being opted in is the default experience. The company plans to have all users’ accounts connected to Fediverse by the end of January. (This does not affect magazines that are set to “private” on Flipboard, which will remain private, he said.)
Flipboard currently has over 10,000 social magazine publishers on its app and over 250,000 individuals who use the Flipboard app to curate content. Considering today’s Mastodon, 1.5 million monthly active usersassuming Flipboard’s users don’t opt out, this could be a notable change for the Fediverse when the Flipboard integration is fully rolled out.
Flipboard is just one of several companies currently embracing decentralized social media. In addition to X’s rival Instagram Threads, which began testing ActivityPub last week, other tech companies are moving in this direction as well. Automattic enables the federation of all blogs on WordPress.org and WordPress.com, and said it is working on doing the same for Tumblr next year. Medium and Mozilla have also set up their own servers, and the latter also supports his Mastodon client called Mammoth.
In Flipboard’s case, after integrating its backend with Fediverse, it may rethink what its frontend should look like for the new age of social media.
“The front end was built before federation,” McCue said. “What are the implications for federation on the front end? How are we thinking about curation and everything else and all the features and tools that we’ve created over the years? “How does it work in a federated world from a user experience perspective? That’s a great question,” he said.
Despite all the changes, Flipboard doesn’t need funding to support new development. As we move in this direction, we are depleting the profits of our own businesses.
The company is also betting on the fact that federated social media may be just the beginning of what’s to come across the web.
“Seeing what was happening with ActivityPub made it very clear that this is the future of the web,” McCue said. “The social web is people linking to pages and people linking to people. So it’s a more complex web.”
He sees Flipboard as part of that opportunity. “We need a way to do discovery and search that is beautiful, simple and easy to use. That’s what we’re focused on,” McCue added.
Source: techcrunch.com
