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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.
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Threads integrating with Mastodon is bad news. Flipboard integrating with Mastodon? Interesting I guess? Hampers Meta’s 4E strategy I suppose.
The more the better, the less power places like Meta have to change the protocol. For example if Meta pushed for a change to the protocol with just us small guys, we would all push back and say no, but really Meta doesn’t have much to lose if they did it anyway. (We would lose access to them and vis-versa, but it’s Meta after all.)
Now if bigger players are joining like Flipboard, all of a sudden changing that protocol means that they could lose bigger chunks of data, losing flipboard would be a bigger deal.
I’m just surmizing, but I think it’ll be good overall. Legitimizes activitypub more and makes it harder for people to change willy nilly
IMO the single biggest risk to the fediverse is allowing one instance to control everything. I think there needs to be a set of ideologies that all fediverse users agree to abide by for the good of the fediverse, the first of which would be: instances should not federate with other instances that are too big. I don’t think “too big” needs to be strictly defined, it could be left up to people to decide, but if users or other instances think you’re idea of “too big” is too big, they are all free to leave/defederate from you too.
Idk anything about Flipboard, much less how many users they have, but if it’s much larger than existing servers, then I think they should make an effort to shrink, or at least freeze signups, or be defederated.
Also yes, I think mastodon.social and lemmy.world are too big and should make an effort to downsize asap.
Meta doesn’t have much to lose if they did it anyway. (We would lose access to them and vis-versa, but it’s Meta after all.)
Meta’s only reason to join the fediverse, is to avoid getting hit by antitrust laws in Europe. It’s not in their interest to make any incompatible changes… and they can’t threaten us “small guys” with reverting to the status quo we chose ourselves.
I see that I can follow them on Mastodon, but it seems like all their posts are just meta announcements vs curated links. Should I be following their individual editors instead? I want to love Mastodon but I just can’t figure out how to find good content there !
From the article it sounds like full integration will be done in January
Okay right on. Thanks Scrubbles. Do you have any reccommendations for Mastodon?
I found that the best way to enjoy/find content on Mastodon is to follow hashtags. Think keywords of whatever you are interested to see in your feed and search different variations of those keywords. Browse those hashtags and follow them if the content seems interesting.
@admin very interesting!
I love the concept of clipboard, but it is curated with the most garbage clickbait articles imaginable. Hopefully this move will be an improvement in that regard!
