The Flipboard magazine app is expanding its investment in Fediverse — the distributed social media ecosystem that includes apps like Mastodon and others — with its recently announced plan to establish its first editorial desks to curate news for the broader federated community. Initially, the company will launch four desktops: News, technology, Cultureand Science – which says it won’t be automated by bots, but by professional curators who have experience discovering and elevating interesting content.
The company already understands the ins and outs of curation, having created an app that allows users to organize articles and updates, including those from social media, into personalized magazines that can also be shared with others.
But more recently, Flipboard has changed his focus to embrace the open social web and Fediverse, with the launch of your own Mastodon server and the announcement of its plans for deeper integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers a growing number of decentralized applications, including the open source alternative to Twitter. Mastodon.
Flipboard has also added support for browsing Mastodon and interacting with its content in its magazine app, after new Twitter owner Elon Musk revoked API access for a variety of third-party services, including Flipboard. Earlier this month, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue shared that Twitter had disabled its API integration for longtime apps like Flipboard, which had been working with the microblogging service for about 13 years. Previously, Flipboard users could view tweets in the app and add them to their magazines. Now, Flipboard says it won’t work with Twitter after Musk changed the price so that your API remove smaller developers.
“While Twitter is allowing payment for some API access, the approach they have taken is prohibitively expensive, unreliable and downright unreliable,” McCue said at the time. “I can’t imagine us or anyone else trusting Twitter again for anything.”
Of course, McCue and the Flipboard team had seen this moment coming and had already redirected the company away from Twitter and towards Mastodon. His own server, or “instance” in Mastodon lingo, now has over 600 members. The company is positioning the instance as a “highly moderate, fast, secure, and reliable” way for new Mastodon users to join Fediverse. When the instance launched in February, it was initially only open to Flipboard’s top curators, but the company aims to slowly scale it to thousands of members over time.
He Mastodon Flipboard Account He has also become an active participant in the community, posting regular recommendations on interesting users to follow (#FollowFriday). McCue himself has also participated in events, like the FediForum virtual “de-conference” where Fediverse builders discussed a variety of ideas and demonstrated their products.
Image Credits: Screenshot of Flipboard Mastodon
Now, Flipboard is adding more value to the Mastodon community with its concept of desktops, which it says will provide explanations and analysis, but won’t flood user feeds with “a million posts.”
The new desktops will also help people find others to follow on Mastodon, something that can still be challenging with the current setup.
“…Since people are not always easy to find on Fediverse, we will raise the voices of thoughtful writers, reporters, thinkers and of course editors who join the conversation,” Flipboard North America managing editor wrote, Carl Sullivan, in a blog post “In other words: you’ll see us promoting other people’s posts,” he said.
The post explained how the different desktops will work. The News Desk will cover the top stories of the day and investigative journalism. Tech Desk will bring the latest technology news on topics like AI, social media, and other impactful innovations. Culture Desk will highlight interviews, reviews and features in the arts and entertainment space. And Science Desk will cover news in areas like space, climate change and more.
The company tells us that the curators running the desks are the employees who curate the accounts with the same names in the Flipboard app itself. The team will feature 3-5 stories per day, but will also boost posts from other accounts on Mastodon to aid in discovery.
“It’s the start of Fediverse and one of the things we’ve heard over and over again is that it’s hard to find great people and great content,” Flipboard’s head of communications Christel van der Boom said. “We believe in a federated future and as you know we are working towards full integration with ActivityPub. These desks are a first step in that direction and offer us a way to learn with the community,” she added.