Flipboard just launched Surf, which is sort of like an RSS feed for the open social network

The company behind the news app Flipboard which is something like RSS feed for the open social network. The app allows users to create feeds that they pull from the open social network, including services like Mastodon and Bluesky. It also pulls content from blogs, podcasts and YouTube videos.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue calls it a “browser for the social network,” and that description . Surf supports a whole bunch of open protocols, including RSS, Bluesky’s AT protocol, and ActivityPub. The latter is used to power decentralized platforms such as Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, PeerTube and Friendica, among others. This follows which allowed full interoperability with Mastodon and other decentralized networks.

The app has been in development for almost two years and allows users to create custom feeds using a combination of sources. If you want to follow a niche topic like, say, 3D printing, you can add notable people to a feed, along with hashtags, specific RSS feeds, favorite podcasts, and more. Since the initial beta launch, Surf comes with 30,000 predefined topics to explore. Custom feeds can also explore multiple topics at once to personalize things.

The app’s home page features a wide range of curated feeds to follow, organized into sections like Featured, Trending, Communities, and Expert Voices. Feeds can be configured in several ways, allowing users to turn things like replies, reposts, or adult content on or off. Fortunately, the order of the feed is also fully adjustable, with a Twitter-like timeline option.

That sounds pretty cool, right? One of the main problems in this new era of social networking in which is the lack of a centralized center. This seems to solve this problem to some extent.

Now a spot of bad news. Surf is technically available right now, but only as an invite-only closed beta. If you manage to get your hands on one of those invites, the app is available for both iOS and Android, with a desktop client coming soon.