Flipboard’s new app Surf adds its own video feed, too

After the TikTok ban came into effect on Sunday, the social network Bluesky Introduced a custom feed for videos on its platform. now, Flipboard’s new app, Surf, Decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, which are dedicated to browsing the open social web, are taking advantage of that move to launch a video feed of their own.

Initially, Surf’s video feed was a combination of video posts in Bluesky’s “Trending Videos” feed and those posts that included the #SkyTok hashtag. The company said it will soon personalize its feed to the end user as well.

This will help distinguish Surf’s video feed from Bluesky’s own It also represents the power that comes with allowing third parties to create feeds for a social networking platform. The surf is currently in the beta With a sign-up list available for interested testers.

“This is the latest example of how custom feeds can be used for all kinds of use cases on the social web – video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, messaging, etc. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. [the protocol that powers Bluesky.]”

To personalize the new surf video feed, McCue said the company will soon add users’ Bluesky following timelines (which is another custom feed) as a feed source. It is filtered to show only video posts. When this final step is completed, the feed will display videos of people who follow users themselves.

after Bluesky sent out its native custom video feed on SundayWhich employs a new TikTok-style user interface, Surf has adopted that design for its feed as well. (Note: If you don’t see the TikTok-style interface in Bluesky, try restarting your mobile app a few times.)

If you are not able to use Surf, which is still in private beta, you can use It feeds directly to Bluesky. Surf has federated its new custom video feed into Blueksy where it is available as another native, custom feed option.

McCue notes that Surf itself can be used to create a variety of video feeds.

As he also built A “BookTok” type feed, One that focuses on users discussing books in videos, similar to TikTok’s BookTalk community. Both of these feeds can be seen Surf And Bluesky.

To create this feed, McCue included all videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.

However, because these tags may exist in apps other than Bluesky, when you use Feed in Surf, you’ll be able to see videos from other services like YouTube, Threads, and Mastodon in addition to videos from Bluesky. This is possible because Surf allows users to explore multiple social networks in its app, powered by protocols such as ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Blusky) and RSS.