Fourteen years ago, when the iPad was new and bursting with unfulfilled promise, an app called Flipboard debuted. Billing itself as a “social magazine,” it let you sign in with your Twitter and Facebook accounts and then browse your feeds in a beautifully designed environment that instantly became a showcase for Apple’s tablet.
I was enthusiastic about Flipboard from the start. But Facebook and Twitter were not so smitten. Over time, the social giants walled off their gardens, making it more or less impossible for Flipboard and other third parties to get the access they needed to build independent experiences around them. Unfazed, Flipboard created its own self-contained social tools, letting users share items and curate digital magazines within the app. And share and curate they do: Flipboard has become a bigger drive of traffic to Fast Company than some higher-profile sources, including Twitter and Reddit.
Over the past couple of years, however, Big Tech’s grip on the social web has loosened. That started in earnest when Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover spurred new interest in Mastodon, an almost 9-year-old grassroots alternative that’s really a network of social networks, all “federated” via an open protocol called ActivityPub. Last year, when Meta launched its Twitter rival, Threads, it even pledged to support ActivityPub, potentially making Threads far more open than Facebook ever was. Another sea change happened in November, when Bluesky—built on an open protocol of its own—became a refuge for millions of Twitter users repulsed by Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s comeback.
So it’s not surprising that Flipboard cofounder and CEO Mike McCue has seized the opportunity offered by this new, less tightly controlled social ecosystem. Flipboard users can now follow Mastodon and Threads feeds, and Mastodon users can follow hundreds of Flipboard magazines. But McCue’s zeal for decentralized social networking has proven so overpowering that the Flipboard app couldn’t contain it.
Today, the company is announcing Surf, an all-new app that’s launching as a beta for iPhone, Android, and iPad, with a waitlist that lets you get in line for an invite. Though not meant to replace the Flipboard app—which isn’t going anywhere—it does remix some of the same foundational ideas into a new sort of app for sharing and discovering content that couldn’t have existed until recently.
Still, there are some fundamental differences. Flipboard is all about following magazines, whether created by a media outlet such as Fast Company, Flipboard’s own editors, or other users. In Surf, the basic organizing principle is custom feeds—ongoing streams of content that can weave together items from Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, RSS feeds, podcasts, and YouTube videos. Anyone can create and share them, mixing items from specific people and media brands with ones selected via hashtags and with the assistance of machine learning algorithms. A custom feed can even incorporate other custom feeds.
In the few weeks I’ve been using the pre-beta version of Surf, so few people have had access that most of the custom feeds I’ve encountered have been created by Flipboard staffers and McCue himself. They include ones on subjects ranging from political news to AI to K-pop to film photography—a starter set that shows the effectiveness of these feeds as a means of scooping up content from all over and putting it in one place.
Not that long ago, being cut off from Twitter might have proved fatal to an app such as this. Now some people may consider its lack of Elon-ization to be a feature, not a bug. It certainly doesn’t stand in the way of an extremely rich experience, and the app offers several options for fine-tuning a feed. As McCue showed me, you could create a feed of social posts from tech writers, regardless of the topic. Or one that filters out anything they say about cryptocurrency, or one restricted to their posts about music. Each feed has tabs such as “Watch,” “Discuss,” “Read,” and “Listen,” and you can specify the default tab—say, “Watch” to put videos front and center.
Historically, creating a Flipboard magazine has been a commitment: If you stop hand-picking content to share in your publication, it dies (I speak as the creator of several dormant Flipboard magazines myself). By contrast, constructing a Surf custom feed is mostly up-front work. After you’ve chosen sources to pipe into a feed, it runs on its own—and might even surprise you.
Shortly after gaining access to Surf in November, for example, I created a custom feed about the first random subject that sprang to mind at that particular moment: Popeye. It instantly began serving up items relating to the character, such as the classic comic strips shared by an enterprising Mastodon user. At the time, I didn’t realize that there’d soon be a burst of mainstream news stories about the spinach-eating sailor—who enters the public domain in 2025—but when they arrived this week, they became part of my Popeye feed, too. You can even invite other Surf users to contribute to your custom feed by creating a hashtag that they can append to their own posts.
Surf is extremely ambitious, and the version rolling out this week remains an incomplete draft, emphasizing creation over consumption. “If you’re into making feeds, this is great for you,” McCue told me. “But if you just want to come here and chill and look at the people you’re following, this isn’t really ready for that.”
To wit: You can already assemble feeds that incorporate items from Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, but only the first of those networks is available as a sign-in option, a necessity for features such as posting items to your own account. Support for signing into Bluesky and Threads is coming and might make the app feel more like a unified cross-posting tool à la the excellent Openvibe. More work also remains to be done to help users find the most interesting custom feeds and let creators see when the ones they’ve published become hits.
McCue says that eventually you’ll be able to publish feeds to the federated web. That would let people follow them in apps other than Surf, driving further decentralization of social experiences rather than pinning the app’s potential impact purely on its own users. (For now, Flipboard isn’t taking any steps to monetize Surf, but its long record of working with media companies that publish in the Flipboard app should prove useful as it zeroes in on a business model.)
In its initial form, Surf’s earth tones and Star Wars-esque logo give off a playful 1970s vibe. I found it kind of endearing, but McCue says that users will be able to pick other themes, including a minimalist, Bauhaus-aesthetic option. “There will be lots of different ways to customize and personalize this and make it your home on the social web,” he told me. Browser and desktop-based versions are in the works, along with ones that make better use of the real estate available on iPads and Android tablets.
The need for something like what Flipboard is trying to build with Surf—an immersive, one-stop social experience curated by people rather than algorithms—seems manifestly obvious. I know the old system has failed me: I’ve abandoned Twitter, my Facebook feed is larded with dreck I never asked for, and even Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads remain constricted by their use of old-school Twitter as a template. It might take quite a while for Surf to reach its full potential, but at least it’s finally technically possible. That’s exciting in itself. And the fact that the Flipboard app is still alive, kicking, and evolving after almost a decade and a half—long after a flurry of knockoffs have come and gone—suggests the company could have the patience to keep at it.
Read/Watch/Listen/Try
Another classic tech book recommendation for you. Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine’s Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer was first published in 1984, when the story of the PC’s creation and popularization was so new it barely counted as history. The two tech reporters did an exceptional job of chronicling it, starting with the launch of the MITS Altair 8800, the first PC that caught on. (The $400 build-it-yourself box was the subject of a famous cover story in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which means the whole PC revolution is currently marking its first half century.) Freiberger and Swaine cover companies that were important in their time, such as Cromemco and Digital Research, and a handful at most that still matter today, including Apple and Microsoft. Unlike last week’s pick, Michael Moritz’s The Little Kingdom, this one is still in print, in an updated 2014 edition available as a paperback, e-book, and audio book. In any form, it’s well worth your time.
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You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also happy to hear from you on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads.
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