Surf, the new app from Flipboard for shopping the open social net, is making it simpler for folks to create and uncover their very own customized feeds centered on their pursuits. As an alternative of getting caught in an algorithmically generated timeline designed by a social community’s proprietor, customized feeds can help you construct an expertise centered on stuff you really care about, like your favourite hobbies, sports activities, communities, or every other matters 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, should 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, however, are geared toward anybody who desires to attempt their hand at feed-building however isn’t positive start.
Launched late final 12 months 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 manage posts from blogs, information web sites, and mainstream social media companies, which had been became customized magazines. However as social companies (like X) locked down their APIs, limiting entry to their content material, Flipboard seemed to the open social net as a substitute. That finally led to the creation of a brand new app, with Surf.
Surf allow you to curate and discover feeds that embrace 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 group, are organized round standard classes and pre-populated with beneficial sources.
For example, should you select to start out a “Hobbies” feed, you’ll be able to faucet on that class after which search for sources so as to add throughout plenty of subtopics, like biking, gaming, Lego, books, baking, mountaineering, dancing, guitar, comics, crusing, and far more.
Plus, you’ll be able to add your individual social account feed from both Mastodon or Bluesky and have it filtered by the chosen subject. You can too use the search bar so as to add particular sources of your individual, then use further instruments to filter these sources so that they’ll solely embrace posts that match the feed’s subject. (This could possibly be useful in case your favourite tech pundit additionally actively posts about politics, for instance, however you solely need to observe what they need to say about tech.)
One other newer characteristic helps 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 embrace Bluesky content material when considered on Bluesky’s app, nevertheless.)
Surf remains to be invite-only however recurrently provides from its waitlist.