Flipboard’s new Surf app adds its own video feed

Social network Bluesky after the TikTok ban took effect on Sunday introduced a custom feed for videos on its own platform. now, Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, Dedicated to looking at the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, it presents its own video feed using this movement.

Originally, Surf’s video feed was a combination of video posts from Bluesky’s “trending video” feed and posts containing the #SkyTok hashtag. The company said it will soon customize its feed for the end user as well.

This will help differentiate Surf’s video feed from Bluesky’s. It also represents the power that comes from allowing third parties to create feeds for a social networking platform. Surf right now beta with a registration list available for interested testers.

“This is the latest example of how dedicated social feeds can be used for all kinds of use cases – video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, messaging, and more. “,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. “It’s still early days, but things are moving very quickly here, especially on AT Proto (the protocol that powers Blusky).”

To personalize the new Surf video feed, McCue said the company will soon add users’ Bluesky Following timeline (which is just another custom feed) as a source for the feed. This is also filtered to show only video posts. When this last step is complete, the feed will show the videos of people that users have followed.

after On Sunday, Bluesky posted a local video feedUsing a new TikTok-style user interface, Surf adopted this design for its feed as well. (Note: If you don’t see the TikTok-style interface in Bluesky, restart your mobile app a few times.)

If you can’t use Surf, which is still in private beta, you can fed directly into Bluesky. Surf has combined its new custom video feed with Blueksy, where it’s available as another local, custom feed option.

McCue notes that Surf itself can also be used to make different types of videotapes.

For example, he also sewed “BookTok” type tape, It focuses on users discussing books in video, similar to TikTok’s BookTok community. This tape can be viewed in both Surf and Bluesky.

To make this feed, McCue included all the videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.

However, since these tags may be available in other apps besides Bluesky, when you use the feed in Surf itself, you’ll be able to watch videos from other services like YouTube, Threads, and Mastodon in addition to videos from Bluesky. This is possible because Surf allows users to explore many social networks within its application, including those supported by protocols such as ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.