Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard and an web entrepreneur because the Netscape days, is a real believer within the fediverse. He doesn’t love the phrase: he’d a lot moderately name it “the social net.” However no matter you wish to name the open, decentralized, interconnected social networking expertise that apps like Mastodon and Bluesky promise, McCue is totally satisfied it’s the longer term.
For the final 12 months or so, McCue and his group have been utterly overhauling the Flipboard platform to make it part of the social net. As soon as the change is completed, Flipboard can be a completely decentralized solution to uncover and browse stuff from throughout the web. The method appears to be going advantageous, although it doesn’t appear poised to take over the fediverse the way in which Threads might if it totally opened up.
On the identical time, although, the Flipboard group has been engaged on one thing even larger. That one thing is an app known as Surf (to not be confused with the opposite lately launched Surf), which McCue known as “the world’s first browser for the social net.” He first mentioned that to me just a little over a 12 months in the past, when Surf was principally only a bunch of mock-ups and a slide deck. Now, the app has been in beta for the previous few months — I’ve been utilizing it most of that point — and a public beta is launching right this moment. Not everybody can get in; McCue says he needs to herald some curators and creators first, to ensure that there to be a number of stuff in Surf when everybody else will get entry. And he guarantees that’s coming quickly.
However wait, sorry, again to the entire “browser for the social net” factor. McCue’s finest clarification of Surf’s large principle is that this: in a decentralized social world, the web can be much less about web sites and extra about feeds. “You gained’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the web site for The Verge, however you possibly can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; each Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; each creator you comply with is simply producing a feed of content material.
Surf’s job, in that world, is that will help you uncover and discover all these feeds. The app can see three sorts of feeds: something from ActivityPub, which implies issues like Mastodon and Threads and Pixelfed; something from AT Protocol, which implies Bluesky; and any RSS feed. You possibly can seek for feeds by subject, writer, or creator; you possibly can curate your individual feeds by combining different feeds. After which you possibly can share these feeds, which different folks can mix and recombine. It’s all just a little complicated. Simply think about a properly designed, vertically scrolling feed, someplace between a Twitter timeline and the Apple Information homepage.
A feed may be made up of virtually any sort of content material, which presents a tough design drawback for Surf. It needs to be equally adept as a social community, a information app, a video platform, and a podcast participant. Combining all that stuff into one place isn’t simply the objective; it’s the entire level. And it’s very laborious to do all of these issues properly.
Personally, probably the most eye-opening second in my time testing Surf has been the way in which the app helps you to mechanically filter a feed. I arrange a feed that’s simply all my favourite stuff: my go-to podcasts, must-read blogs, a few can’t-miss YouTube channels, and my favourite people on Bluesky. I can open that feed and see every little thing, so as, it doesn’t matter what it’s or who it got here from. However I may filter it to simply present all of the movies within the feed or faucet on “Hear” to show it right into a podcast queue.
Surf isn’t but a full-featured app for any of those makes use of, a lot much less all of them, but it surely’s already a reasonably helpful app for all types of media. It presents movies like an endlessly scrolling TikTok feed, which is definitely a reasonably enjoyable solution to flip by means of a YouTube channel. Posts with hyperlinks are formatted like information tales, with large photos and headlines. It’s not a very dense timeline-scrolling expertise, both — the entire thing is extra like Flipboard’s flippy magazines than the For You pages we’re used to.
As a result of it’s attempting to compile a bunch of disparate platforms into one, search may be messy — I discovered 5 profiles with my title and movie, as an example, and it’s not apparent which one is the one you’re in search of. Surf can also be designed to be interactive, however proper now, that just about solely works in the event you’re a Mastodon consumer liking Mastodon posts. For many different issues, it’s both sort of damaged or completely damaged. For now, and possibly for some time, Surf goes to be a lot better as a consumption device than a social one.
McCue sees the social net as the start of a wholly new web. He even makes use of old-web metaphors to elucidate these early merchandise: the present period we’re in is like AOL again within the day, “a walled backyard that contained all of the innovation within the walled backyard”; Surf is like old-school Yahoo, “a set of feeds that different folks have made.” He needs to allow paid feeds, so publishers, creators, and curators can generate profits on the platform. He has large concepts about customized designs for feeds, to allow them to look extra like homepages.
There’s an terrible lot left to construct — to not point out quite a lot of protocols and instruments left to persuade all of the web’s platforms and publishers to work with. However I’ve been speaking to McCue about this for 2 years now, and his conviction and optimism haven’t wavered a bit. After I inform him that I positively wavered — that I used to be as soon as all in on ActivityPub as the longer term however am apprehensive seeing Bluesky develop on one other protocol and listening to a number of the points Threads and others are having with ActivityPub — he simply laughs. One, he says, that’s the way it at all times goes in these early phases. Two, that’s what Surf is supposed to repair.
To show his level, McCue opens up a feed stuffed with basketball content material, created by David Dashing. Dashing was an enormous determine in early NBA Threads, a group that has splintered due to a few of Threads’ moderation and group insurance policies. Now, persons are posting with #nbathreads on Bluesky and elsewhere, too. It’s messy. However Surf, McCue says, can carry it again collectively. He begins scrolling Dashing’s customized feed: “You’re seeing Bluesky posts, Mastodon posts, Threads posts, Flipboard posts, something with the hashtag #nbathreads throughout the entire social net. For those who publish a podcast, in the event you publish a YouTube video, something with the hashtag #nbathreads, it’ll present up on this feed.” Dashing can add or take away particular person posts and even use Flipboard’s filtering techniques to eliminate something that feels political, mentions playing, or no matter else he needs to do.
McCue is virtually giddy as he scrolls by means of all this basketball content material. That is the entire thing, proper right here. “Finally,” he says, “you’re simply not going to care whether or not one thing is on Threads — I don’t write you a separate sort of e mail since you’re on Gmail, proper?” Individuals will use a number of apps, there can be a number of communities, and that’s good. “There are nerds on Bluesky, there are nerds on Threads. How can all of the nerds collect collectively?” That’s the query for the fediverse — sorry, the social net — and Surf seems prefer it is perhaps one of the best reply anybody’s give you thus far.