Do you use Flipboard?

I’ve been using Flipboard for many years, since its early days – and, I love it. It has been a brilliant social magazine and discovery platform for me. I’ve been curating a number of “magazines” there around my interests, over the same period of time. Up until recently, these were largely general / significant world news, tech news, and products I thought looked cool; this year I also added gaming and social web magazines as well. They are a nice way to aggregate stories in a visual manner, and share them with anyone interested in similar topics. I follow a lot of other magazines in the same way – Flipboard is an app that lives on my phone’s home screen and is often what I’ll open to check what’s new and happening in the world.

I was immensely grateful to have the opportunity to spend a bunch of time with Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue and members of the team during a recent trip to California. It was a delight for me personally to get to know Mike a little bit – although he was on the board of Twitter for a time that overlapped with when I was working there, it was not a situation that would have caused us to interact; his background in and knowledge of the tech industry is phenomenal (he was head of tech at Netscape, c’mon! amazing), and he is really excited about the opportunity that the Fediverse offers to keep the web open. I’m fully on-board with that!

One of the things that the Flipboard team has been working on is pivoting the platform into a fully ActivityPub-compatible experience. It has been exciting to follow their progress as these efforts have expanded. Last week, Flipboard announced that a range of local news publications around the US were joining the fediverse through this integration. This sort of thing really speaks to the power and opportunity that the open social web provides, both to publishers to reach the federated audience, and for readers to follow more topics and feeds that interest them, in platforms and apps of their own choosing.

It has been possible to follow my Mastodon account inside of the Flipboard app for a while, but I’ve been excitedly waiting for the opportunity for my Flipboard account to be federated in the other direction – and that happened this week!

What does this mean in practice?

• You can now choose to follow my main Flipboard profile without using the Flipboard app directly (if you want). If you follow my main account, federated address @andypiper@flipboard.com, that will mean you get to see flips to all of my magazines.
• You can also follow the individual magazines if you’re only interested in one or two of them. That’s where things get a bit less straightforward to directly discover from your Fediverse client app – the addresses are easy to find if you click through to one of them from my Flipboard profile, but you might need to know the complete address to search in your Mastodon client.
  • My “Fediverse & The Social Web” magazine is here on the web, and the federated address is @fediverse-the-social-web-andypiper@flipboard.com – a little bit longer and maybe less easy to find from Mastodon.

BTW I’m not sure when others can get their Flipboard accounts federated – it’s a beta feature for a limited set of curators at the moment and I am one of the lucky ones, partly since I am working with my friends at Flipboard to build community around the fediverse.

I’ve got a toy app that I’ve been noodling with for a while (based on something that Les Orchard made) that is intended to act as a discovery page for my various fediverse profiles; it doesn’t quite work the way I’d like, since WebFinger responses are sometimes not consistent / to spec, some platforms require authentication, so several are missing right now – I’m tinkering occasionally. I should probably add the Flipboard bits to that, at some point… oh and this reminds me to update it to point at my new PeerTube account as well.

Another quick plug for my t-shirt design for Fediverse fans, while I’m at it! Flipboard not mentioned there, though…

Final recommendation – regardless of your interest in either Flipboard, or my own magazines and profile there – you need to check out Dot Social, Mike’s podcast about the future of the open social web. It has been really varied and the episodes have been full of deep and interesting thinking. Worth a listen, if you’re following the evolution of the web today.

https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/07/31/federating-my-flipboard/

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@andypiper@andypiper.co.uk nice!