Flipboard debuts new Surf beta release with upgraded Bluesky integration

Flipboard Inc. has introduced a new beta release of its Surf content discovery service, TechCrunch reported today.

The update comes about four months after the company first started testing the app with a limited number of users. The main enhancement is an improved integration with Bluesky, another social networking service.

Palo Alto, California-based Flipboard is a social media company backed by more than $230 million in funding. It provides an eponymous content aggregation platform that allows users to create custom magazines with articles from around the web.

Surf is a new service the company debuted last December. Similarly to Flipboard’s namesake app, it’s designed to help users access content from multiple sources, but provides a different set of features. Surf makes it possible to create a custom feed that displays not only news articles but also social media posts, YouTube videos, podcasts and other types of content.

The app is designed to work with the so-called fediverse. This is a collection of social networking services that interoperate with each one in various ways, such as by allowing users to easily move their accounts between platforms. Meta Platforms Inc.’s Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky are among the services that form the fediverse.

Bluesky is a core focus of the new Surf beta version that Flipboard introduced today. The release, which is called Blue Wave, introduces an enhanced integration between the services that makes it possible to sync login credentials. Users can now sign into Surf with their Bluesky credentials and access the feeds they’ve set up in the latter platform.

Bluesky is an increasingly popular microblogging service that started out in 2019 as an internal Twitter Inc. project. It spun off in 2021 and launched two years later. The service has since emerged as a major X competitor with about 30 million users.

Users who log into Surf with Bluesky can access content from the latter service’s Discover feed, which displays trending topics and suggests accounts to follow. It’s also possible to view content from Bluesky accounts the user already follows, as well as other sources. 

Those other sources include Custom Feeds, custom content recommendation algorithm that users can integrate into their Bluesky accounts. There are also so-called Starter Packs. Those are user-curated account collections that aggregate content about specific topics.

Besides viewing content from Bluesky, Surf now also makes it possible to interact with that content in various ways. Users can like posts, repost them and submit replies. According to TechCrunch, Surf can now be used as an alternative to the Bluesky app.

Bluesky syncs content to other social networks using a technology called the AT Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or atproto for short. The technology packages user-created data into cryptographically-signed repositories. Those repositories are shared with other social networks using the ubiquitous WebSocket data transfer protocol.

Alongside the improved Bluesky integration, the new beta release of Surf introduces several other improvements. Flipboard has reportedly added a setup wizard for creating content feeds. There is a new set of filters for removing irrelevant posts. 

In conjunction with the feature additions, Flipboard has opened the beta version of Surf to more users. It plans to further expand availability by moving the service out of Apple’s TestFlight app testing program, which supports up to 10,000 beta testers. Flipboard also has plans to develop a web version of Surf.

Image: Surf 

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