Flipboard is making good on its fediverse promises.

Flipboard is making good on a major fediverse promise. Late last year, at the same time it announced it would be switching user accounts to ActivityPub, Flipboard said it planned to let users follow users on federated platforms that used ActivityPub from the Flipboard app. Starting Tuesday, that feature is here, meaning that you can follow people from places like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed right inside Flipboard.

  • @[email protected]English
    62•3 months ago

    What is Flipboard?

    Seriously, 4 to 6 words is all it would take.

    Flipboard, a social media aggregate app, is making good on a major fediverse promise.

    Is that what it is? Did I guess right?

    • @[email protected]English
      26•3 months ago

      I downloaded and registered for a Flipboard account way back when it was first created. At that time, it was just a news aggregator that felt more like a magazine because of how the page turn animations worked. It was nice because at that time there were no issues with entire articles getting fed into the reader, and it was a dream come true for iPad users in the early days.

      These days, you can only read the first few sentences of an from the app and then you have to tap a link to go to the actual, often cookie-walled, website to read any more of the article.

      On top of that, people who post comments in Flipboard tend to get insanely toxic. Like facebook-levels of insane hot takes.

      For those reason, I don’t really interact with it as much and I’ve considered removing it from time to time. The reason I don’t is because I’m curious about how this fediverse thing will work out for it.

      • ℍ𝕖𝕝𝕚0𝕤English
        19•3 months ago

        you have to tap a link to go to the actual, often cookie-walled, website

        Kind of like how RSS/Atom is not useful anymore. Most feeds don’t contain the actual articles, in an attempt to increase clicks and ad revenue. That’s just sad, I miss the old internet.

        • @[email protected]English
          14•3 months ago

          There are some RSS readers that will download the actual URL and apply “reader mode” on the page to present the full article. I think FreshRSS has such a plugin.

          • Tywèle [she|her]English
            4•3 months ago

            Also many RSS reader apps provide the same functionality. ReadYou on Android and Reeder5 on iOS for example.

          • @[email protected]English
            3•3 months ago

            It does! I haven’t configured mine yet but I use Feedme’s mobilizer to do the same thing at the moment.

    • @[email protected]English
      17•3 months ago

      Before podcasts, there used to be RSS readers. They let you quickly subscribe and scan a lot of blogs and catch up on latest posts. Flipboard started as a fancy mobile app version, with access to articles from mainstream news providers.

      It’s grown and changed a lot, but it’s essentially a quick way to scan for interesting daily news.

      They’ve now added ways to subscribe and catch up on Fediverse sources like Mastodon (and soon, Lemmy).

      The CEO has a podcast called Dot Social where he talks to people about how this Fediverse stuff all fits together: https://dot-social.simplecast.com/

    • VictorEnglish
      6•3 months ago

      Indeed, not that difficult.

    • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼English
      1•3 months ago

      I vaguely remember using it like 10 years ago when it got pre-loaded on a Samsung Tablet I bought… fun times…

      It seemed to me like a combination of a news app and a social network