“It’s the future of social media, and the future of the web!” Speaking with Mike McCue makes it immediately clear why Flipboard has joined the fediverse. Monday, the company announced that Flipboard has begun federating, and that people from other parts of the fediverse can now interact and follow with Flipboard accounts.
The plan is to implement federation in three steps. The first step started this week, and allows full interoperability between a selected group of 27 publishers and creators. In January 2024, all Flipboard accounts will federate, with people from the fediverse being able to follow and interact with any public curator. Finally, Flipboard plans for April 2024 for all Flipboard accounts to interact with fediverse accounts as well.
McCue explains Flipboard’s Magazines, by saying that if you are interested in a subject, for example Mountain biking, you want to see all of the content, and not limit it to only one type: not just posts (microblogs), but also videos, photo’s, articles. Flipboard’s magazines is a collection of all these different types of media. He says that federation presents a great opportunity to introduce people to the concept of Flipboard and its curated magazines.
McCue is also thinking on how Flipboard maps onto the current structure that most fediverse software uses. In Flipboard, one account can maintain multiple magazines, and you ‘flip’ the content into one specific magazine. With the current implementation of federation, you only follow a Flipboard account, and all the posts you see in your feed get the text “Posted Into [Magazine]” added. You cannot follow an individual magazine from an account yet. As Flipboards Magazines do not easily map onto the structure that other fediverse platforms use. The closest analogue might be PeerTube’s Channels, which also don’t federate.
Flipboard is also thinking about how to share their work on content moderation, stating in their announcement post that “we will share [our red/green domain list] with other instance owners in the Fediverse as soon as is practically possible”. McCue explains that the red/green domain list is used by Flipboard to determine if websites are trustworthy, with quality content and fair reporting (green list), or untrustworthy or harmful for the red domain list.
Flipboard uses these list to determine on how to approach accounts and posts in their recommendations. The fediverse has been thinking and working about various initiatives on how to share information about whether other fediverse servers are trustworthy. For more information, The Nexus of Privacy has an extensive look at three major initiatives in the fediverse, FediSeer, FIRES and The Bad Space. There are many open questions on how Flipboard’s work will look, but it does represent an expansion in the thinking of how the fediverse can work together to share information about trust.
The steps by Flipboard to federate represent two trends going on in the fediverse currently;
a transition of the fediverse towards an open social web, where products and organisations can add a social components to their product by adding fediverse integration. The other is in placing an increased focus on content curation. A significant group of people in the fediverse express skepticism about algorithmic discovery. Hand-curated content represents an alternative way of finding new content in the fediverse, and Flipboard makes that easier now, with their federation of magazines.
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