Flipboard’s new Surf app adds its own video feed, too
After the TikTok ban went into effect on Sunday, the social media network Bluesky Launched a dedicated feed for videos On its platform. now, Latest Flipboard, Surf, It is intended for browsing the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, and takes advantage of this move to provide its own video feed.
Initially, Surf’s video feed was a collection of video posts on Bluesky’s “trending video” feed and those posts that included the hashtag #SkyTok. The company says it will soon personalize its feed for the end user as well.
This will help differentiate the Surf video feed from the Bluesky video feed. It also represents the power that comes from allowing third parties to create feeds for a social networking platform. Currently browsing at Beta With a subscription list available for interested testers.
“This is just the latest example of how personalized feeds can be used on the social network for all kinds of use cases — video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, messaging, etc. — that used to be the exclusive domain of large walled gardens,” said Flipboard CEO Mike Macko. to TechCrunch via email. “It’s still early days but things are moving very quickly here, especially at AT Proto [the protocol that powers Bluesky.]”
To customize the new Surf video feed, McCue said the company will soon add users’ Bluesky Follow timeline (which is just another personalized feed) as a feed source. This is also filtered to show only video posts. When this final step is complete, the feed will show videos from people the same users follow.
after Bluesky on Sunday shipped its custom native video feedwhich uses a new TikTok-style UI, Surf has adopted this design for its feed as well. (Note: If you don’t see the TikTok style interface on Bluesky, try restarting your mobile app a few times.)
If you can’t use Surf, which is still in private beta, you can use it Feed directly to Bluesky. Surf has unified its new custom video feed with Blueksy where it is available as another native and custom feed option.
Maco points out that Surf itself can be used to create different types of video feeds as well.
For example, also built Feed of type “BookTok”, Which focuses on users discussing books via video, similar to TikTok’s BookTok community. This summary can be found on both browse and Bluesky.
To create this feed, McCue included all videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
However, since these tags may exist in other apps besides Bluesky, when you use the feed on Surf itself, you’ll be able to watch videos from other services like YouTube, Threads, and Mastodon, as well as videos from Bluesky. This is possible because Surf allows users to explore multiple social networks in its app, including those supported by protocols like ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.
