Surf, the new app from Flipboard for shopping the open social internet, is making it simpler for individuals to create and uncover their very own customized feeds targeted on their pursuits. As a substitute of getting caught in an algorithmically generated timeline designed by a social community’s proprietor, customized feeds can help you construct an expertise targeted on stuff you really care about, like your favourite hobbies, sports activities, communities, or every other matters you wish to observe.
With Thursday’s introduction of Starter Units, Surf is simplifying the method of constructing these customized feeds, personalizing them, and even publishing them off-platform, in the event you select.
Making feed creation simpler permits extra individuals to take management of their social media expertise and wrest management of their feeds again from tech giants like Meta and Google. Startups like Graze and SkyFeed already let Bluesky customers build their own custom feeds, however these instruments are designed with extra technical customers in thoughts, not essentially a mainstream social media shopper.
Starter Units, alternatively, are geared toward anybody who desires to attempt their hand at feed-building however isn’t certain the way to start.
Launched late last year into an invite-only beta, Surf is section two of Flipboard’s unique mission to curate the online. The corporate’s flagship Flipboard app had allowed individuals to gather and manage posts from blogs, information web sites, and mainstream social media providers, which have been become customized magazines. However as social providers (like X) locked down their APIs, limiting entry to their content material, Flipboard regarded to the open social internet as an alternative. That in the end led to the creation of a brand new app, with Surf.
Surf enables you to curate and discover feeds that embody the content material from social networks constructed on open protocols, like Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and others, together with Meta’s newest app, Threads, in addition to content material from blogs, podcasts, YouTube movies, information websites, or the rest with an RSS feed.
The brand new Starter Units, created by its staff, are organized round fashionable classes and pre-populated with beneficial sources.
For example, in the event you select to begin a “Hobbies” feed, you possibly can faucet on that class after which search for sources so as to add throughout numerous subtopics, like biking, gaming, Legos, books, baking, mountain climbing, dancing, guitar, comics, crusing, and far more.
Plus, you possibly can add your personal social account feed from both Mastodon or Bluesky and have it filtered by the chosen subject. You too can use the search bar so as to add particular sources of your personal, then use extra instruments to filter these sources so that they’ll solely embody posts that match the feed’s subject. (This might be useful in case your favourite tech pundit additionally actively posts about politics, for instance, however you solely wish to observe what they need to say about tech.)
One other newer function enables you to publish your customized feed to Bluesky.
To take action, faucet the three-dot menu on the feed’s header, then faucet “Publish to Bluesky,” and the feed will seem within the Feeds tab of your Bluesky profile. (This feed will solely embody Bluesky content material when considered on Bluesky’s app, nevertheless.)
Surf continues to be invite-only however recurrently provides from its waitlist.
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