Wow. This reminds me that the Fediverse really has become something. I hope only good things can come from this.
I just hope it’s not just a way to get users then close back up the platforms once they have enough users.
I think the key to avoiding the google chat trap again is that the private company needs to have way more to lose than to gain by killing federation. If a critical mass of flipboard’s users use it through ActivityPub, then ending that would hugely damage their business. Flipboard may be both large enough to bring a significant I flux of users and content into the fediverse, but small enough, especially if the federate with threads, to not be overwhelming.
I guess we’re moving away from individual social networks towards a network of networks, a sort of… uh… meta network one might say.
meta, you say?
“Basically, we’re in the process of replacing our whole social back-end with ActivityPub,” says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “I think Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream consumer service that existed in a walled garden that switches over to ActivityPub.”
OK, that sounds good.
Flipboard is still a thing?
Flipboard. That’s a news reader for phone/tablet right? I think I used to use it a number of years ago.
Then I started wanting finer control over my newsfeeds and got into RSS clients. But this is an interesting development in that it provides a lower-level way to access Flipboard content that might suit me better?
I wish Apple News would do something like this. I subscribe to it to get around certain paywalls, but it seems pretty unscriptable.
Apple News needs to allow me to share the original link to the article instead of some Apple News link.
@mike@flipboard.social 's post containing the accounts to follow:
https://flipboard.social/@mike/111602382232229349
It should be possible to get integration for these to show up in Lemmy, instead of having to crosspost everything.
If Lemmy gets support for multi-communities and we can use flibpoard magazines as communities in lemmy, that would be incredible!
I know kbin has this feature, it calls them collections. You can see some examples on the list of public collections here. They don’t seem to federate though, so I’m guessing they’re tied to the instance you make them on and can’t be subscribed to from others.
I can get behind this.
It’s definitely better intentioned and much less potential harm could be caused by this than Threads.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts.
In spirit, a federated Flipboard shouldn’t feel all that different from, say, one of those Twitter users who would obsessively curate news or information around a specific topic.
The promise of the fediverse is that if you like or respond to a post, that is also compiled and synced across apps and services, but Flipboard hasn’t quite finished that yet.
McCue has spent the last year telling anyone who will listen (including The Verge) that ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the federated social internet are the future.
Flipboard launched a Mastodon instance called flipboard.social earlier this year, and recently announced it’s no longer integrating with X and focusing instead on open platforms.
The original article contains 599 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I have never heard of Flipboard before this post.
