Flipboard is making good on an important fediverse promise. Late last year, around the same time it announced it was moving user accounts to ActivityPub, Flipboard said it planned to let users follow other users on federated platforms who use ActivityPub from within the Flipboard app. As of Tuesday, that feature is live, meaning you can follow people from places like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed right from within Flipboard.
Flipboard will feature Fediverse profiles in different ways in the app. Flipboard search will show Fediverse accounts, for example, while the Explore tab will have recommendations curated by editors, according to a press release. In a screenshot shared by Flipboard, the Explore section has a “Fediverse” tab that is filled with profiles like Edge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel's Threads account and Mike Masnick's Mastodon accountand you can follow those accounts with a tap.
While you will be able to see posts from federated accounts on other platforms, you will not be able to reply to or like those Flipboard posts unless your Flipboard account is also federated, which may not be the case for everyone. Flipboard has only enabled this feature for some accounts so far, and if yours isn’t federated yet, you’ll be able to request that this happen, says Flipboard’s Marci McCue. The edge.
Still, the expansion of Flipboard's fediverse could turn the app into a one-stop shop for your news. and social media posts from the people you care about most. I’m intrigued by the idea – I usually keep my article feeds and my social feeds in separate apps, but I can see how it could be useful to combine the two.
Flipboard has been a strong proponent of federation. The company created its own instance of Mastodon (Flipboard.social) in 2023, and CEO Mike McCue has written and I talked about How important federation is. But thanks to things like this Flipboard update and the new ability added in Threads to see replies to your federated posts, the lofty promises of federated social networks are becoming more and more of a reality.
