Why Mastodon, ActivityPub and the Fediverse Will Change Social Media Forever
Today we’re making it easy for you to sign up for Mastodon and flip through it all on your Flipboard. Our immediate goal is to provide you with a new source of great content and conversation while helping our curators connect with new audiences. Our long-term goal, however, is much, much larger.
Mastodon is an emerging microblogging service similar to Twitter, only a lot more open and a lot more benevolent. It’s one of several new social media services that are federated (aka connected) to each other via ActivityPub, which is an open protocol adopted by the W3C, the standards body for the World Wide Web. Collectively, these services form a new part of the World Wide Web called the Fediverse. Other Fediverse services include PixelFed, an open photo-sharing service similar to Instagram; PeerTube, a nascent video-sharing service that resembles YouTube, and BookWyrm, an entirely new way to form book clubs online. These services and others are in their early days but they hold tremendous promise.
Why is this interesting? Because most social media today is controlled by a few large proprietary platforms, often with leaders who value engagement at all costs, regardless of the impact on our democracies, societies and mental health. Change is badly needed and the Fediverse represents a fundamentally more open and equitable approach to social media. The Fediverse is a revolution years in the making by a pioneering group of engineers and technologists similar to the ones who created the web. Their mission is to gradually establish open alternatives to today’s closed, proprietary services like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram while enabling entirely new services to be invented that will connect people and content in new ways that are far healthier, more transparent and less manipulated.
Flipboard is passionate about the Fediverse and all it stands for, so we are taking two initial steps today:
1. Introducing Flipboard.social
Wondering how to create a Mastodon account? We can help. Head on over to Flipboard.social to request an invite to our new Mastodon instance (aka server). Flipboard.social is a fast, reliable and welcoming home for Flipboard users to easily get started in the Fediverse. Once you get your invite you can create an account and start exploring alongside other Flipboard users and curators. We’ll be sharing tips, featuring interesting people to follow and collecting feedback. Flipboard.social also gives curators another place to share their latest Magazines with a whole new group of people in the Fediverse.
2. Now in Beta: Flip Through Your Mastodon Timelines
Once you have a Mastodon account you can connect it to your Flipboard to flip through and interact with your Mastodon timelines in beautiful Flipboard fashion. You can reply, favorite, boost and post directly to Mastodon. You can also flip interesting posts you discover on Mastodon into your Magazines for other Flipboarders to enjoy. And you can even flip stories you see anywhere on Flipboard to Mastodon so that others in the Fediverse can discover them too. This is an early beta integration.
Looking Ahead
The combination of Flipboard.social and our beta Mastodon integration helps make the brave new world of the Fediverse more approachable and beautiful. But that’s just the beginning. Flipboard is exploring how best to implement ActivityPub so that we can federate our unique ecosystem with every service and user in the Fediverse. This will make it possible for users on Mastodon or other Fediverse services to follow content creators, curators and Magazines on Flipboard. Similarly, Flipboard users will be able to follow users and feeds on services like Mastodon, PixelFed and PeerTube. Ultimately, Flipboard is tearing down the walls of our own walled garden to give users, curators and content creators more choice, more freedom, more transparency and more ownership.
The future will be federated. And so will Flipboard.
— Mike McCue, cofounder and CEO.