Flipboard is taking its biggest step yet towards fediverse. The company recently announced that it has moved its user accounts to ActivityPub. This means that everyone who posts content on Flipboard can now present and interact with it on apps like Mastodon.
Currently, ActivityPub has 25 platforms (including The Verge). But Flipboard has made a commitment that by March next year, it will allow any user on the open platform to use a federated universe account, and also allow flipboard users to follow any federated universe account on the open platform within the app. At that point, Flipboard will essentially be a platform based on the ActivityPub protocol, similar to Mastdon or Pixelfed, except that the interface is designed to be more suitable for reading articles than browsing posts. I believe that before the Threads complete the fusion, this is already the most important good news in the Federation Universe.
Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, said, "Basically, we're replacing the entire social backend with ActivityPub. I think Flipboard will be the first mainstream consumer social service to break out of the walled garden and move to ActivityPub. ”
There seems to be a lot of technical jargon involved in the previous article, so let's use the Verge account as a quick explanation. From now on, when we add content to a "magazine" on Flipboard, we also automatically create a post with a link to the story we added, a link to the Flipboard magazine, and any comments that correspond to that content. This will be a standard ActivityPub post, similar to what you've seen on Mastodon. Now, you can follow a variety of magazines on Flipboard, or follow the corresponding Flipboard account in Mastodon, including access to diverse content from the Federation Universe on any other platform. And no matter which option is chosen, users will get the same content feed. The only difference is that Flipboard looks more like a book app, while Mastdon is more of a typical timeline-centric social interface.
Experience-wise, joining a Flipboard is similar to a specific topic or news interface that Twitter users are familiar with. Flipboard has always relied on platform creators to deliver more high-quality content to users, with the only difference being that creators can now publish content to the entire Federation Universe, including Flipboard, all at once. Flipboard strives only to provide the best reading and discovery tools and does not force users to consume such content within the platform.
At first, these posts will only be one-way to post and read. However, the Federated Universe promises that if a user likes or replies to a post, the post will also be compiled and synchronized between the app and the service, but Flipboard does not currently support this feature. However, McCue said that this feature will be launched in January next year, so everyone can wait.
Last year, MCCUE repeatedly emphasized that ActivityPub, Mastdon, and the linkage social Internet are the future trends. Flipboard launched earlier this year called FlipboardSocial's Mastodon instance recently announced that it would no longer integrate with X and would instead specialize in open platforms.
At the same time, the MCCUE is cautious to point out that there are still many issues that need to be carefully studied. Flipboard has a long history of content moderation tools and optimizing the reading experience, but more new ones are still to be investigated. Should people create articles directly through their Flipboard account, or should they continue to opt for the classic posting mode on their Mastodon account?McCue said he still has all of his accounts, saying, "I think it's really interesting how these accounts are going to be related to each other." "There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the cultural convergence and interface docking of the Federation Universe, and MCCUE is confident that it will find out.