Surf, the new app from Flipboard for looking the open social net, is making it simpler for folks to create and uncover their very own customized feeds centered on their pursuits. As a substitute of getting caught in an algorithmically generated timeline designed by a social community’s proprietor, customized feeds assist you to construct an expertise centered on belongings you truly care about, like your favourite hobbies, sports activities, communities, or every other subjects you need to comply with.
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 folks 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 construct their very own customized feeds, however these instruments are designed with extra technical customers in thoughts, not essentially a mainstream social media client.
Starter Units, alternatively, are geared toward anybody who desires to strive their hand at feed-building however isn’t certain methods to start.
Launched late final yr into an invite-only beta, Surf is part two of Flipboard’s unique mission to curate the online. The corporate’s flagship Flipboard app had allowed folks to gather and set up posts from blogs, information web sites, and mainstream social media providers, which had been was customized magazines. However as social providers (like X) locked down their APIs, limiting entry to their content material, Flipboard regarded to the open social net as a substitute. That in the end led to the creation of a brand new app, with Surf.
Surf allows 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 anything with an RSS feed.
The brand new Starter Units, created by its group, are organized round widespread classes and pre-populated with advisable sources.
As an illustration, in the event you select to start out a “Hobbies” feed, you may faucet on that class after which search for sources so as to add throughout quite a lot of subtopics, like biking, gaming, Legos, books, baking, climbing, dancing, guitar, comics, crusing, and far more.
Plus, you may 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 further instruments to filter these sources in order that they’ll solely embody posts that match the feed’s subject. (This might be helpful in case your favourite tech pundit additionally actively posts about politics, for instance, however you solely need to monitor what they should say about tech.)
One other newer characteristic allows 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 seen on Bluesky’s app, nevertheless.)
Surf remains to be invite-only however repeatedly provides from its waitlist.
