Instagram Threads isn’t the only app joining the decentralized social web, which includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others, with its recent support for the ActivityPub networking protocol. Today, social magazine app Flipboard is announcing it’s also now integrated into ActityPub. In its initial phase, select Flipboard accounts will be discoverable and followable by millions of users of decentralized social apps, including Mastodon. Over time, all Flipboard profiles will be available on fediverse, as this network of decentralized social apps is known.
The company announced its intention earlier this year to join the fediverse. She started by integrating her app with Mastodon through an API and creating her own Mastodon server, flipboard.social, before fully integrating ActivityPub. This allowed Flipboard to get a feel for the decentralized social media world and learn how its users would react. It also gave Flipboard a way to stay connected to social media after Twitter/X raised its API fees for third-party developers, making it unsustainable for many developers to continue working with the company.
The original purpose of the Flipboard app was to curate social “magazine” news and information found on the web, including links to articles, photos, and other social media posts. As a result, she relied on Twitter as one of her sources of information. That changed this year, when Flipboard moved its Twitter integration to Mastodon and another alternative social app, Bluesky. It also created its own Mastodon server and began curating news across the feds community through editorial “offices” focused on improving news discovery on Mastodon.
All of this led to Flipboard itself becoming a federated social networking app, a process that begins today.
Initially, Flipboard is testing the integration with select accounts, including publishers such as Semafor, Pitchfork, Fast Company, Medium, LGBTQ Nation, Refinery 29, Digiday, Polygon, SPIN, Kotaku, Frommer’s, The Verge, Smithsonian Magazine, Refinery 29, The Root , ScienceAlert, AFAR Media and more. While many focus on news, there are also some non-profit organizations such as The News Literacy Project and education-focused news site In 74, in this first list.
Image Credits: Flipboard
“As we said at the beginning of this year, we’re going to integrate ActivityPub into Flipboard and essentially rework our entire backend into it,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue explained in a chat with TechCrunch about the upcoming changes. He says the company had first integrated with Mastodon at the API level so users could log into their Mastodon accounts, see those posts and interact with others in the fediverse from Flipboard. “But you had to have an account on all those platforms,” McCue noted.
“What we’re announcing on Monday is basically our road map for how we’re going to open ActivityPub and basically knock down the walls around our own walled garden,” he added.
With the changes, when Flipboard users edit an article or post to one of their social magazines in the Flipboard app, with an optional comment, that “flip,” as it’s called, will also appear as a post on their new account on flipboard.com Mastodon . This is not the same server that Flipboard built before (flipboard.social), which was a place to experiment with decentralized social media. Instead, it’s the Flipboard app itself that’s now connected to fediverse. User posts on Mastodon will include a link to both the flipped article and the user’s Flipboard magazine, while the user’s profile will link to their Flipboard profile page.
Image Credits: Flipboard
As this rolls out, all Flipboard users will have a Flipboard.com account connected to fediverse, even if they host multiple Flipboard magazines. This is not ideal as their magazines may focus on different topics. But McCue believes that Mastodon could one day support a sub-stream concept that would allow for more differentiation.
Users will be able to opt out of having their flips published on Mastodon, but opting in will be the default experience. The company expects to have all of its user accounts connected to fediverse by the end of January. (This won’t affect any magazines set to “private” on Flipboard. Those will remain private, McCue notes.)
Today, Flipboard has over 10,000 social magazine publishers on its app and over a quarter million people who curate content using the Flipboard app. Since Mastodon today has around 1.5 million monthly active usersthis could be a significant blow to fediverse when the Flipboard integration is fully rolled out, provided Flipboard users aren’t opted out.
Flipboard is just one of many companies now embracing decentralized social media. In addition to X competitor Instagram Threads, which began testing ActivityPub last week, other tech companies are also moving in this direction. Automattic has enabled all WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs to integrate and said it is working to do the same with Tumblr next year. Medium and Mozilla have also built their own servers, and the latter also supported a Mastodon client called Mammoth.
For Flipboard, after integrating its back end with fediverse, the company can rethink what its front end should look like for this new age of social media.
“The front was built in a pre-Confederation era,” McCue noted. “What are the implications of federation on the front end? How do we think about curation and all the things, all the features and tools we’ve built over the years? How does this work in a world that is federated and from a user experience perspective? That’s a big question,” he said.
Despite all the changes, Flipboard doesn’t need to raise capital to support its new developments. She is running on the profits of her own business as she moves in this direction.
The company is also betting that federated social media may be just the beginning of what’s to come for the internet as a whole.
“I saw what was happening with ActivityPub and it became very clear to me that this is the future of the web, period,” McCue said. “The social web is people connecting to pages and people connecting to people. So it’s a much more complex web.”
He sees Flipboard as part of that opportunity. “There has to be a way to do discovery and search that’s beautiful and simple and easy to use. That’s what we’re focused on,” McCue added.
