In December, we started to federate the accounts of some Flipboard publishers and in February, we introduced Magazines to the fediverse. Now, we’re taking two important steps: federating the accounts of 400 creators and expert curators; and enabling two-way communication so that new followers and fediverse activity are visible and actionable in the Flipboard app.
To learn more about this, take a look at our blogpost:
Thanks so much to everyone who has given feedback on what we’ve done so far. We welcome your thoughts and comments as we continue on our journey to fully federate Flipboard.
@Flipboard very nice! Is there a way to discover federated accounts other than reading a spreadsheet?
It seems a bit uncovenient on mobile devices.
A web directory like what appears on Mastodon websites would be cool. Also, do you have the equivalent of an "instance timeline"? Not sure if that is the correct name.
@lazza Hi Andrea, at the moment the spreadsheet is all we have — definitely unwieldy and we are looking into better ways of sharing the information. What do you mean by an instance timeline? It sounds very cool!
@AskPippa Hi Pippa! You should be able to find all the handles in this Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUFTo6rPvhqzCReLaM1c6-xUKRuBVqlZVStZl9Al-EU/edit. Just search for the handle you're interested in on Mastodon and that should bring up their profile and all the Magazines they curate, then hit Follow. It may initially look like the accounts have no content, but that's likely because no one from your server is following them yet. Once you follow them, the next thing they flip should appear in your feed.
@Flipboard Thank you for this! This makes me want to follow a bunch of people here and on FB (#Flipboard, not the bad "FB").
I'm glad you can see the value in the #Fediverse, rather than other technologies (cough#AIcough) which are on a dumb bubble trajectory. The Fediverse is where the real next wave will be.
@ScottStarkey We're absolutely committed to federation as a company, and as individuals we just love spending time in this place, so are delighted to introduce our community to it!
@Flipboard Is there a good place to find out what Flipboard actually is? It's super confusing to me. All I know is that it was preinstalled on my Samsung phone a few years ago and I couldn't uninstall it which was super annoying.
@fell Hi Felix! That's right — we used to have a partnership with Samsung where our product was installed on all phones as a service called Briefing, but that's no longer the case. We're an app that's been around for more than a decade. Publishers and users can add ("flip") links into Magazines (for publishers, these can be RSS-fed whereas other users will manually flip content). We also have many users that just use Flipboard to keep up on news and the things they're passionate about, without doing any curation at all. Now that we've started federating, people can follow some of our publishers' and users' profiles and Magazines in the fediverse. Ultimately, we will be federating the whole platform. Here's a bit more from the website.
Hi! We also thought your name was on the list — hence our flippant reply that didn't acknowledge it wasn't! We checked and it was an oversight; we'll flip the switch for you now and get you added to the doc asap.
@deutrino Those are two popular communities on Flipboard and a natural place for us to start, but it was not intentional and a good reminder that we should diversify! There are excellent curators around photography, technology, human rights, climate and many other topics in the mix. We hope to add many more in the coming weeks and will be updating the spreadsheet as we go. You can also apply to have your own profile federated by filling in this survey:
I went thru and followed a few, now that I know the spreadsheet will be updated I'll come back and have a look at it.
would be great if it could be organized by topic, or have a field with some hint of topic in it, but I understand that might be difficult. my main concern is, having read thru the spreadsheet, I'm hoping new listings won't be added in the middle, which would mean I'd have to read the whole thing over again to find new ones!
@deutrino Gotcha! Will take that back to the team working on the spreadsheet — definitely agree that we need to make the spreadsheet as easy to navigate as possible!
@Flipboard yup, maybe even a date added to spreadsheet field so ppl could sort on that.
cool project, as somebody who enjoyed curating on tumblr (where it was more about art/imagery and less about links/articles) I'm excited to see it and will def be looking for interesting people to follow on my various alts, thanks for doing it.
@deutrino That's so great to hear! We love that you can follow their whole profile, or just their topical Magazines, which means that if you love their curation on music but have no interest in food, you only have to see what you want!
@deutrino@Flipboard wow! I love your suggestions. I’m a reader myself I’d like to see more history, art, pickleball, cars, and general trivia. I curate these topics. I’ll follow you.
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