After the TikTok ban went into impact on Sunday, social community Bluesky launched a customized feed for movies on its platform. Now, Flipboard’s latest app, Surf, which is devoted to searching the open social internet and decentralized providers like Mastodon and Bluesky, is benefiting from that transfer to introduce a video feed of its personal.
Initially, Surf’s video feed was a mixture of video posts on Bluesky’s “trending video” feed and people posts that included the hashtag #SkyTok. The corporate says it would quickly personalize its feed to the tip consumer, too.
It will assist differentiate Surf’s video feed from Bluesky’s personal. It additionally represents the facility that comes from permitting third events to construct feeds for a social networking platform. Surf is presently in beta with a sign-up listing accessible for testers.
“That is simply the newest instance of how customized feeds on the social internet can be utilized for all kinds of use instances — video sharing, picture sharing, dialogue teams, messaging, and so on. — which have been the unique area of the big walled gardens,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue advised TechCrunch through e mail. “We’re nonetheless early days however issues are transferring tremendous quick right here, particularly on AT Proto [the protocol that powers Bluesky.]”
To personalize the brand new Surf video feed, McCue stated the corporate will quickly add customers’ Bluesky Following timeline (which is simply one other customized feed) as a supply for the feed. That is additionally filtered to indicate solely video posts. When this closing step is accomplished, the feed will show movies from the folks the customers themselves observe.
After Bluesky on Sunday shipped its native customized video feed, which employs a brand new TikTok-style consumer interface, Surf adopted that design for its feed, as effectively. (Be aware: for those who’re not seeing the TikTok-style interface on Bluesky, strive restarting your cellular app a couple of occasions.)
For those who’re not in a position to make use of Surf, which continues to be in non-public beta, you need to use its feed instantly on Bluesky. Surf federated its new customized video feed to Blueksy the place it’s accessible as one other native, customized feed choice.
McCue factors out that Surf itself can be utilized to make completely different sorts of video feeds, too.
For instance, he additionally constructed a “BookTok” sort feed, which focuses on customers discussing books on video, just like TikTok’s BookTok neighborhood. This feed could be seen on each Surf and Bluesky.
To make this feed, McCue included all movies tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
Nonetheless, as a result of these tags might exist on different apps in addition to Bluesky, once you use the feed on Surf itself, you’ll be capable to see movies from different providers like YouTube, Threads, and Mastodon, along with movies from Bluesky. That’s attainable as a result of Surf permits customers to discover a number of social networks in its app, together with these powered by protocols like ActivityPub (utilized by Mastodon), the AT Protocol (utilized by Bluesky), and RSS.
