Why Flipboard Looks to the Fediverse for Its Next Big Evolution

Eight years ago, I sat down with Mike McCue to talk about Flipboard. When we spoke at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. offices, he shared that the company had found its stride and that this would be the last startup he’d ever build. Much has changed since then, and Flipboard faces a transformative moment. After initially integrating content from social media platforms, the app has since pivoted to embrace the decentralized web. In doing so, McCue wants Flipboard to become “a Fediverse browser.”

Disclosure: I previously worked at Flipboard and own a small amount of equity. Rest assured, the opinions expressed here are solely my own. I have — and remain — a big fan of the technology.

“It is, by far, my favorite startup,” McCue proclaims to me as we sit in the lobby of a San Francisco, Calif. hotel. “I’ve never been more excited about Flipboard and our future than I am as we sit here today.” It’s a remarkable statement for a company that will celebrate its 15th anniversary next month, especially as it has managed to stay competitive despite the rise and fall of countless news aggregation apps.

A year ago, I wrote about Flipboard’s adoption of ActivityPub, an open protocol designed to make social networking interoperable. At the time, McCue explained in a blog post that “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.”

His message piqued my curiosity, and I was keen to learn about what’s next for the content curation and discovery app. So, I asked McCue, and he gladly walked me through what led Flipboard to pursue the Fediverse, the challenges and opportunities in the space, and what’s next for his company.

Table of Contents

Flipboard Abandons the ‘Walled Gardens’

The idea behind Flipboard, as McCue recalls, came when he was reading a National Geographic magazine aboard an airplane. “I was like, ‘Why is the web nowhere near as good as this magazine?” he says, stunned that the experience of reading that article online was disappointing, filled with pop-ups, small images, and dismal typography. It was when McCue vowed that “we’re going to make the web beautiful again.”

However, having an app with a stellar design is one thing. Where would the content come from? To that end, Flipboard turned to social media, something McCue admits he didn’t initially agree with—it took convincing from co-founder Evan Doll: “Social is the primary discovery vehicle. If you recommend a piece of content to me, I’m way more likely to read it than if I happen upon it.”

The API Reality Check

“We all believed that social was fundamental to how people would discover content on the web.”

Using application programming interfaces (APIs) helped the company fill the app with content containing data from Twitter and Facebook. “What we built was a social magazine that let you go and pull content from all the different people, no matter what platform they were on, and organize it and present it in this beautiful, simple-to-use way, which allowed you to discover new kinds of content, new sources, and people that you’ve never even heard of before, and be able to get the best of,” McCue asserts, describing the moment as “fantastic.”

Unfortunately, the feeling was fleeting, especially when social media platforms modified API access and turned off the content faucet. McCue reveals this issue led him to step down from Twitter’s board of directors after two years. Whenever they would discuss the API, he would be forced to recuse himself because, as he tells it, Flipboard was the single largest user of Twitter’s feed. Having enough, McCue resigned but persuaded then-CEO Dick Costolo and then-Chairman Jack Dorsey to keep the API open.

That moment exposed a vulnerability in the company. Any API disablement posed an existential threat to Flipboard, crippling its social layer. “That’s our whole discovery engine,” McCue decried. “We need a way for people to curate content.”

Shaken but not undeterred, McCue directed the company to take control of its own destiny. “We saw these APIs. We saw the writing on the wall—we couldn’t rely on them. What we have to do now is build our own social layer.”

That led to Flipboard 2.0.

Building a Better Mouse Trap?

“What we basically built with our Magazines launch was our own walled garden.”

The app’s successive generations aimed to recreate the magic from social media platforms without dependence on them. That being said, McCue concedes the effort was merely a placeholder. Flipboard 2.0’s signature was allowing users to self-publish Magazines. However, this feature created friction when curating content—people would have to create another account. Sure, there were some wins, such as onboarding consumer advocate and environmental lawyer Erin Brockovich, but it also prevented many other content from being easily discovered in the app.

“Why would you put time and energy in there when you could also be putting time and energy into Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, and there’s just a lot more people there? It was really hard to get that going,” McCue points out.

Nevertheless, over time, Flipboard began proving more of its worth. Some creators who had difficulty getting noticed on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram succeeded on the app. “If you’re a brand new creator and just trying to get started, it’s really hard,” McCue states. “So what you also do is put that content on Flipboard, and you start building an audience there because you don’t need followers on Flipboard. You just need people who are following a topic. And if your content is related to the topic, it will get picked up.” He points out that Flipboard has become a significant web traffic driver, ranking between the second and fifth most referrer—it drove 4.5 billion referrals in 2023.

“We’re an amazing discovery engine for content creators […] but it was still a walled garden.”

The company would continue to iterate on this strategy for three more app generations until 2022, when another pivotal moment forced McCue to make a “world-changing” decision.

‘I’m Done With Twitter’

More than two years ago, Paul Pelosi, husband of U.S. House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), was attacked at the family’s San Francisco home by a far-right conspiracy theorist. Billionaire Elon Musk, who had just become Twitter’s new owner, published—and deleted—a tweet a link about unfounded, homophobic allegations about the assault. McCue was shocked that such a post would come from Twitter’s owner, let alone that it was allowed on the platform. It was the last straw.

“I’m never going to tweet on Twitter again,” McCue claims.

But what other viable option was there? At some point, he came across Mastodon and eventually was introduced to the Fediverse and ActivityPub: “I’m like, holy shit, this is world-changing […] This is the biggest thing that has happened to the web since the web itself. This will change everything.”

Elaborating further, he says he wished there was a way for people to connect through an open standard. Until ActivityPub, the internet merely connected documents and websites—”there was no notion of identity.” But the Fediverse establishes an “open social layer for the web itself.” What’s more, it’s not dependent on an app—if something like Flipboard disappeared, it would remain online and belong to the creator.

“ActivityPub is an open social network built on the web that anyone can join, any developer can build on, any brand can participate in, and any company can build a presence in. When you make a profile on the social web, on the Fediverse, it’s a website. You are on the web.”

But Mastodon and ActivityPub-supported are far from perfect. McCue acknowledges some wrinkles have to be ironed out, but “the basic concept of just being able to follow someone or something, get a set of posts back, like, comment, repost, follow those core primitives—that is what ActivityPub is all about.”

“This is a big, big deal,” he continues. “If we can get this to be established, it gives creators independence. They’re no longer…slaves to the Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok algorithm. It gives them the ownership of their audience. It defragments their audience and their efforts. It allows them to put all their best work—video, newsletters, podcasts, articles, or conversations—on the same profile.”

Flipboard Enters the Fediverse

Flipboard would spend 2023 taking steps into the Fediverse, eventually adding support for third-party ActivityPub-enabled apps such as Threads, Pixelfed, Firefish, and PeerTube.

Making Sense of Flipboard.Social

At one point, Flipboard launched a Mastodon server, flipboard.social, joining others like the BBC, Medium, and Mozilla. Although it stood up multiple editorial accounts, the instance was always designed to be an experiment. McCue clarifies Flipboard.social was meant to help the company learn “how to moderate effectively in the Fediverse.” It never intended to turn it into a product or “some big server we want people to join.”

Nevertheless, it’s critical that companies not build solutions in a vacuum, so having a Fediverse presence allows Flipboard to witness the problems and ideate on potential solutions.

In addition to moderation, the company wanted to understand “how the server could be run in a production environment where a lot of these other instances are run on.”

Not every company shares McCue’s Fediverse enthusiasm. In September, Mozilla declared its decentralized experiment over in favor of artificial intelligence and its Firefox browser. When told about the news, Flipboard’s CEO called it a “tragic mistake” and a “short-sighted” decision.

“The amount of sheer garbage on the internet is exponentially growing. How do you find the good stuff? The good people? The amount of misinformation, toxicity, and insane shit that AI is enabling is extremely problematic. The answer is human connection,” McCue retorts.

Although he states human connectivity will be how we fight AI slop, he agrees the technology is incredibly powerful, enabling creators to churn out better content. He stresses that he’s not “anti-AI,” saying it can aid with discovery, but explains it can be massively abused. Anyone could profit from an AI-generated summarization of someone’s work, threatening the livelihood of the artist or creator. “This is a very bad dynamic,” he points out.

“This is why it’s important for the good people of the internet to be able to be connected in a genuine way across an open platform that isn’t run by some billionaire,” McCue says. “And then, they have unimpeded the ability to create content, share that content with others, to ultimately have people pay for that content. That is absolutely the world that’s fundamentally achievable with the social web…”

All-In On ActivityPub

“The web has webpages and websites. The social web has feeds and posts. Those are the atomic units.”

Flipboard is so enamored by the decentralized protocol that its whole architecture is based around it. “We’re the only company I know of that’s ever done that,” McCue remarks. “We’ve fully swallowed the ActivityPub pill.” He illustrates the point by showing that if you search for news on Flipboard, you can follow people who previously didn’t exist in the app before, all curated from the Fediverse.

Much of this integration won’t be visible to Flipboard users—it’s mostly behind-the-scenes changes. This is transforming the app into what McCue calls a Fediverse browser. It’s becoming that central hub curating the feeds and posts from ActivityPub-powered apps and enabling users to discover, browse, react, or respond to them without needing to hop from one app to another.

Fediverse Benefits For Flipboard Users

“The benefit is that we give all of our Flipboard users more access to more people and content with a flick of a switch. The user doesn’t have to do anything,” McCue insists. “There are just now more people to follow and more content to get when they go into the For You feed or a topic feed. You’re just going to see posts from the Fediverse.”

Integrating ActivityPub won’t magically create the world McCue envisions. He recognizes that the hard work begins now, and it starts with educating people to turn on the federation switch. But as adoption grows, the service becomes better.

“What we have to do is we have to get people to turn on the federation switch.”

“With Threads, it’s an opt-in versus an opt-out. It really should be an opt-out—they’ll probably get to that point at some point. With BlueSky, it’s 100 percent Fediverse. With Mastodon, it’s 100 percent Fediverse. And with Flipboard, it will be 100 percent Fediverse when we finish all of our federation work. So, the net of it is that all of our users now have access to a growing array of content […] Basically, the whole entire ecosystem that our curators [and users] have access to just massively grew and is continuing to grow as more people federate and more content gets put into the Fediverse.”

Flipboard’s Solution to the Fediverse Discovery Problem

And while Flipboard users can discover new people to follow, the company is working to help its creators get their content noticed off-platform. McCue discloses that the app will soon use Bridgy Fed to federate Flipboard Magazines into Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. When implemented, users can discover topic-based posts, especially if it has a hashtag.

Whatever Flipboard does, in the end, it’s about increasing content exposure. The company is betting that the Fediverse will unlock a much larger potential audience for emerging creators, helping them build a following they might not have otherwise been able to on traditional social media platforms. Convincing creators to federate their Flipboard accounts will open up their flipped content to more discovery.

“Basically, every time you post something [in Flipboard], it goes into this Magazine, and then people can see and discover it, and then they can start boosting it, and then realize who you are, they can start following this Magazine and other Magazines,” McCue highlights.

Even still, McCue knows discovery needs work—it’s “not really happening yet.” And more people do not use Flipboard than those who do. How can creators tap into that potential audience? It’s not an easy process today, and Flipboard knows it. “People discovery is completely busted in the Fediverse,” McCue declares. He discloses that it’s a big challenge his team has begun working on and won’t be a Flipboard feature. Instead, it’s a “completely new product.”

He declined to provide further comment.

Updated 12/18: Flipboard has unveiled Surf, a standalone app that helps you discover content on the decentralized web, letting you search for posts from Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, RSS feeds, podcasts, and YouTube.

Allow Flipboard to Reintroduce Itself

Publicly, Flipboard is described as being a news aggregation app that competes against Apple News. The company pitches itself more specifically as a content curation and discovery platform. Regardless of its presentation, it has been impacted by the economic waves that have affected many of its peers, some of which are no longer around. So I asked McCue if Flipboard’s Fediverse push would boost its fortunes.

“The amazing thing about the Fediverse for us at Flipboard is that it just makes Flipboard better,” he states. “It’s a better content curation and discovery experience. You can discover more content than what was on there before the Fediverse…and it’s a better curation platform because now when you curate, more people will discover it. So, it’s just Flipboard, but better. And that’s the simplest way to think about that.”

McCue highlights that what the company is doing now is “really just about giving our users access to more content and people that they can follow, and giving our curators and our publishers much broader reach in this growing open social realm.”

He strongly believes there’s still a place for Flipboard in today’s society: “The need is even greater now because…the amount of noise on the internet is so insane…and exponentially growing because of AI-generated content that the need to find the good stuff is at a higher level than ever before.” And although people go to X, formerly Twitter, Threads, and other social platforms to find out what’s happening, the vibe has changed compared to years ago.

“Where Flipboard really shines is when you have a very specific set of interests, and you can dive deep and see the world’s best content for those interests. There’s just nothing like that,” McCue boasts. “So right now, it is actually more needed than ever.”

“Human credibility—that human connection—is fundamental. When Flipboard was at its best, that’s what you saw. You saw really interesting people that we curated. We curated the people, not the content.”

Regarding market leaders Apple and Google, he replies that, unlike Big Tech, Flipboard emphasizes the human connection, which McCue restates is important for discovery. Although you receive a feed of articles relevant to your interests, you must also understand why it’s being recommended to you.

“We have all these amazing people—climate scientists, archeologists, photographers, all these people who are now joining the Fediverse, more and more joining every single day,” he says. “They’re joining from Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, Flipboard, and WordPress. They’re joining from Ghost, and there’ll be more and more of these folks joining. And so now you’re able to discover content that they are recommending. It’s not some AI engine that’s recommending it. They’re recommending, and you can engage with those people. You can join these communities. This is what is absolutely a must-have right now, today. You have to get that human connection on the web to save the web. That’s what we’re doing.”

Featured Image: Flipboard co-founder and Chief Executive Mike McCue. Photo credit: Ken Yeung