It’s safe to say that the social media landscape has transformed dramatically. While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn once reigned supreme, recent industry turmoil has given rise to new entrants. As users grow increasingly wary of billionaire-owned social networks, they’re gravitating toward decentralized alternatives. Yet despite this evolution, one fundamental challenge persists: effectively discovering relevant content. Now, a new app from Flipboard called Surf aims to solve this longstanding problem.
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.
Introduced in December 2024, Surf is designed to be “the first browser for the open social web.” As Flipboard Chief Executive Mike McCue told me, it’s a “completely new product” to tackle people discovery, something that’s “completely busted in the Fediverse.” It also has the potential to be the tool the company needs to tear down the walled garden of its platform and create the social layer McCue envisions.
“Until now, our connections to each other have been siloed and owned by a few monolithic social networks,” he said in a statement. “The rise of the open social web means we can now imagine entirely new ways to connect people and information online. Surf is built from the ground up for this new era, giving people the tools to shape their online experiences and experiment with new ways to build sustainable communities on the web.”
In a time when people have grown discontent with the platform formerly known as Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s policy changes at Meta, there’s renewed attention on the Fediverse. However, migrating over to Mastodon and other platforms like it poses a risk: How do you find people to follow if they’re so decentralized? An advantage of the Fediverse is that users don’t suffer from platform account fatigue. But the downside is that there’s a poor discovery experience.

Flipboard’s Surf app is currently available in a beta period it calls “Dawn Patrol,” with the first users being “‘feed builders,’ people interested in creating custom feeds around diverse topics, communities, and interests.”
After a few weeks of using the app, here’s my roundup of everything you need to know about Surf.
Time to Surf the Fediverse
Like its sibling app, Surf allows you to browse, discover, and create custom feeds around topics you’re passionate about. It adheres to Flipboard’s philosophy of “informing and inspiring,” but a noted difference is that Surf uses feeds instead of Magazines as its atomic unit.
After logging in with my Mastodon username, I created my first feed around my newsletter, The AI Economy. Using the search bar at the bottom of the app, I queried the term “AI” and was immediately shown a diverse group of results. Not only were there suggested feeds to review, but I could also see profiles of people spread across the Fediverse who might be talking about this topic. Surf also displays Flipboard Magazines, which I can look at along with YouTube channels, podcasts, and RSS feeds.

Once you’ve selected an option, you can designate that person or item as a source, which Surf will use to populate the feed you’re building. So, if I chose my “AI Economy” Flipboard Magazine, for example, and added it as a source to my “AI” feed, new articles I’ve flipped into the Magazine will show up in real-time. Likewise, if I opted for my Mastodon account, all my posts would be displayed in the feed.
Some examples of sources include:
- Flipboard Magazines
- YouTube channels
- RSS feeds
- Mastodon accounts
- Bluesky profiles
- Other Surf feeds
Users can fully customize their feeds in several ways: they can rearrange the post order, choose whether to include reposts and replies, personalize the name and description, and add a custom tile image. Furthermore, Surf takes collaboration to the next level through hashtags. When creators specify a particular hashtag, the app automatically pulls in any posts from Bluesky and Mastodon that use it, creating a dynamic, cross-platform feed.
How does Surf mitigate feed pollution? To prevent irrelevant content from proliferating, Flipboard applies the same topical filters and moderation tools it uses for its eponymous app. This means you can enter specific topics you want your feed to be limited to—my AI feed is restricted to text posts that match the “artificial intelligence,” “generative AI,” and “machine learning” topics. In doing so, although I have TechCrunch as a source, only posts that match my filter will be pulled in.
But while this is a good feature, I have noticed Surf doesn’t have a complete topic library like Flipboard. When creating a feed about the Creator Economy, I was unable to apply topics such as “creator economy,” “creators,” or “influencers.” Unfortunately, the app only supports pre-populated topics—you cannot manually type them in.
Breaking Down Surf’s Home Screen

When viewing Surf’s home screen, you’re presented with a lengthy page that starts at the top with replies to your posts from the Fediverse. From there, the app displays the feeds you’ve favorited or chosen to follow. Below that are your custom feeds where you can view their chosen sources. Though it’s useful, I found it difficult to find the feed I wanted after I’ve created more than four—I’d love to see the “view all” link more prominently shown.
This is where the personalization ends on this page. Everything below this point is editorially curated by Flipboard’s team. My former colleagues have done a good job of creating feeds based on what’s trending. For example, as I’m typing this, there are feeds about the Philadelphia Eagles going to Super Bowl LIX, Colombia’s tariff war with the U.S., the former South Korean president being indicted, the Australian Open, and more.
There are also niche sections around technology, the news, local content, sports, and more.
A Work in Progress
Surf is a good attempt by Flipboard to productize its work around the decentralized web and to expose users to more people and content seamlessly without needing to pester them to federate their social media accounts.
That being said, don’t expect this app to be fully polished. As it’s still in beta, it’s understandable that there will be some quirks. As I mentioned, one improvement is flushing out the topic list so it’s more complete for feed creators. I’ve also experienced a sluggish app periodically, with load times and scrolling effects less than stellar. I will admit, however, that I’m uncertain if it’s because I have an older model phone (Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra).
In addition to these, I’d like Flipboard to improve feed sharing off-platform, refine third-party app integrations, update the interface for search results, and
Besides the aforementioned topic list issue, other improvements I hope Flipboard will make include accelerating loading times, making it easier to share feeds off-platform—links are not friendly and don’t open in-app smoothly, refining third-party app integrations, enhancing the source search results page, and clarifying how the social graph aspect works with feeds.
I’d also like to see Surf supporting ActivityPub-enabled publications, such as WordPress blogs. Is there a way to add RSS links from blogs and websites you follow online?
That being said, there’s a sense that Surf could create new content opportunities that its sibling app was perhaps limited in attempting. For example, with TikTok temporarily “going dark” for less than 12 hours in January, McCue established a feed called #SkyTok to offer an alternative.
As I spend more time with Surf, I’m amazed by the potential created by feeds and the Fediverse.
How Surf Differs From Flipboard
Some may wonder why the company Flipboard opted to launch Surf separate from its eponymous app. One reason might be that it allows the team to experiment with the Fediverse without being encumbered by Flipboard’s technical constraints. Perhaps in the future, the team may consolidate its apps.
One of the similarities between Flipboard and Surfshare is around content curation. In my view, the foundational experience is the same. However, where things deviate is how the content is discovered. With Flipboard, the company worked with publishers and creators to add feeds. It also included social media feeds from Twitter and Instagram. But, as McCue pointed out, Flipboard was held hostage by the whims of Big Tech. API changes could have devastating effects.
Instead, Surf mainly surfaces content from third-party and decentralized platforms while benefiting from its sibling app’s content portfolio. It doubles up as a fediverse search engine and curation service. Unlike Flipboard, Surf appears to put more proportional weight on the individual user than the content.
It’s too early to tell how Surf will perform as the company is slowly adding users who will help build up the app’s feeds. In any event, a benefit is the discovery of new voices, something that’s not easily found on Flipboard. If you’re looking for articles about artificial intelligence, for example, then Flipboard would be the choice app. On the other hand, if you want to read, watch, or listen to people sharing their opinions and perspectives about AI from Mastodon, Bluesky, and ActivityPub-powered platforms, Surf is the one to use.
In other words, Flipboard’s Surf curates voices throughout the Fediverse without the need to gatekeep or endure account fatigue.
Admittedly, there are still parts of the app I’m unclear about—I hope to have another sit down with McCue to dive deeper into Surf’s future—but one thing appears clear: This app is not meant to replace Flipboard. I see both apps being functionally relevant but for different use cases. And while there are overlaps, I recognize some key differences between the two. It’s my hope that the company Flipboard keeps the user experience between the two apps functioning like flowing water.
Tearing Down the Walled Garden of Content

McCue once told me he wanted Flipboard to be “the go-to place for what you’re passionate about and show multiple perspectives from people that are just as passionate, if not more.” It’s a mission the company has been on for 15 years, but with the media landscape in chaos, Flipboard needs to rethink its execution.
Changing API access and Elon Musk acquiring Twitter would be the catalysts McCue’s team needed. Over the years, the havoc being wrecked on the social web negatively impacted Flipboard’s ability to ingest content, even threatening its existence. That led to the company embracing the Fediverse, believing it to be a solution that would open the app up beyond what McCue felt was a walled garden and exposing users to more information online.
The Fediverse establishes an “open social layer for the web itself,” he said. Flipboard would no longer be subject to the whims of billionaire social media owners. Now, it sheds light on more creators than ever, giving them greater ownership of their audience.
If anything, Surf is an app that tackles one of the biggest problems in the Fediverse: Discovery across multiple apps. If you’re like me, it can be frustrating hopping from one ActivityPub-powered app to another—where should we be posting, and how do we find the people we want to follow? It’s maddening to try and remember where a specific creator is posting versus another. People don’t want to have a Salesforce instance set up to manage their social media lives. Flipboard’s Surf brings order to the chaos, giving us some organization to the millions of people who have migrated away from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other legacy platforms in favor of the decentralized web.
Want to give Surf a try? Sign up for the waitlist here.
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