Flipboard is going to let you follow fediverse accounts right inside the app
Flipboard is going to let you follow fediverse accounts right inside the app
Flipboard is making good on its fediverse promises.
Flipboard is making good on a major fediverse promise. Late last year, at the same time it announced it would be switching user accounts to ActivityPub, Flipboard said it planned to let users follow users on federated platforms that used ActivityPub from the Flipboard app. Starting Tuesday, that feature is here, meaning that you can follow people from places like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed right inside Flipboard.
What is Flipboard?
Seriously, 4 to 6 words is all it would take.
Flipboard, a social media aggregate app, is making good on a major fediverse promise.
Is that what it is? Did I guess right?
I downloaded and registered for a Flipboard account way back when it was first created. At that time, it was just a news aggregator that felt more like a magazine because of how the page turn animations worked. It was nice because at that time there were no issues with entire articles getting fed into the reader, and it was a dream come true for iPad users in the early days.
These days, you can only read the first few sentences of an from the app and then you have to tap a link to go to the actual, often cookie-walled, website to read any more of the article.
On top of that, people who post comments in Flipboard tend to get insanely toxic. Like facebook-levels of insane hot takes.
For those reason, I don’t really interact with it as much and I’ve considered removing it from time to time. The reason I don’t is because I’m curious about how this fediverse thing will work out for it.
Flipboard is one of the biggest Fediverse platforms out there, second only to Threads I believe (unless you count WordPress, maybe?). 145 million active users. I think it's mostly used by younger gen X/older millenials.
It didn't have ActivityPub integration originally but promised to add it a while back, kind of like how Tumblr is joining the Fediverse, although Tumblr doestnd seem to implement ActivityPub just yet.
Before podcasts, there used to be RSS readers. They let you quickly subscribe and scan a lot of blogs and catch up on latest posts. Flipboard started as a fancy mobile app version, with access to articles from mainstream news providers.
It's grown and changed a lot, but it's essentially a quick way to scan for interesting daily news.
They've now added ways to subscribe and catch up on Fediverse sources like Mastodon (and soon, Lemmy).
The CEO has a podcast called Dot Social where he talks to people about how this Fediverse stuff all fits together: https://dot-social.simplecast.com/
Indeed, not that difficult.
I vaguely remember using it like 10 years ago when it got pre-loaded on a Samsung Tablet I bought… fun times…
It seemed to me like a combination of a news app and a social network
I still remember flipboard being forcefully installed as the action button app for an old phone. My rage continues to smolder a decade later.
An app that couldn't be uninstalled and took up precious resources. That's all they'll ever be to me.
How do people like Flipboard? I need to find something to get news now that I'm off Reddit. Is it pretty decent at giving different perspectives in articles or is it pretty much algorithm based on what you'll prefer?
RSS reader is how I’ve gone tbh.
I dont want my news being chosen by a social media algorithm
That's kind of what I was worried about, was if it was algorithm based, and if it was, how bad is it pushing content vs showing me what I would be interested in. RSS feeds may be difficult cause I never really committed to any specific publications or sites, so I wouldn't have any specific ones to populate the feed.
I just use Lemmy. Follow the right communities and I don't feel like I'm in the dark in any way.
Haven't gotten to that point yet; I've followed/unfollowed a few just due to general spam or some pretty clear biases (whether I agree with them or not).
I kinda like it. It's sort of a self-curated magazine. It takes a while to get it tweaked for my personal preferences.
So, in my opinion, it's a little like Lemmy, but focused more on the links than the conversation around them. Also, much more glossy and polished than Lemmy.
It's worth checking out, and I'm quite happy that they seem to be gradually adding Fediverse support.
Ty! Will have to look into it some! My problem is I don't have any specific preferred news sites already so I guess I'll be just spamming big ones til it gets sorted out a bit? I'd also like to keep it as balanced as possible, if not just to be prepared for potential points of conflict to be knowledgeable on.
It's fancy. Sync for Lemmy really lets you customize things, but I do like the default Flipoard flip actions, font sizes, layout. You can make custom groupings of content you want to view. I forget what the branded term is, but it's like you can make your own magazine and flip through it.
I'm Suprised flip board still exists to be honest I always found the a Google feed kinda did the same thing better.
Neat!
Before podcasts, there used to be RSS readers. They let you quickly subscribe and scan a lot of blogs and catch up on latest posts. Flipboard started as a fancy mobile app version, with access to articles from mainstream news providers.
It's grown and changed a lot, but it's essentially a quick way to scan for interesting daily news.
They've now added ways to subscribe and catch up on Fediverse sources like Mastodon (and soon, Lemmy).
The CEO has a podcast called Dot Social where he talks to people about how this Fediverse stuff all fits together: https://dot-social.simplecast.com/
Ok