The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
Seeing bigger companies start using the fediverse makes me think back. I want to say that this is a good thing because the fediverse is open and can’t be owned, it’s a stream of information that no company can control. I do have one nagging thought though: that’s exactly what we thought about the Internet in general. It’s an open public network, no one can own it, information will be democratized, etc. And that was all true to a degree but companies did find ways to dominate it and control the flow of information (at least for a lot of people - I know all of us here are liberated internet super gurus). It makes me wonder what the fediverse will look like in 10 years. Will it be powering every TV and social media app? Will we hearken back to the days when it was small and cool? Seems likely.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 10 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.
At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts.
In spirit, a federated Flipboard shouldn’t feel all that different from, say, one of those Twitter users who would obsessively curate news or information around a specific topic.
The promise of the fediverse is that if you like or respond to a post, that is also compiled and synced across apps and services, but Flipboard hasn’t quite finished that yet.
McCue has spent the last year telling anyone who will listen (including The Verge) that ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the federated social internet are the future.
Flipboard launched a Mastodon instance called flipboard.social earlier this year, and recently announced it’s no longer integrating with X and focusing instead on open platforms.
The original article contains 599 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!