Flipboard’s Surf joins several existing apps designed to view Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms, as well as BlueSky and ActivityPub.1 I love Flipboard CEO Mike MkCue’s vision of the “social web,” as described by David Pierce at The Verge with feeds superseding websites.

“You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.

Surf’s job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds.

I have tried Tapestry and Reeder, which have a similar philosophy of combining feeds from multiple sources and platforms into a single place. I found those apps not quite ready for me to use regularly, but I love the promise of that direction.

It’s what Dave Winer calls Textcasting and I’m eager to see it mature.

  1. Surf also joins several apps named “Surf” or “Surfed.” ↩︎