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 shopping the open social internet and decentralized companies like Mastodon and Bluesky, is benefiting from that transfer to introduce a video feed of its personal.
Initially, Surf’s video feed was a mix 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 top person, 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 at present in beta with a sign-up checklist obtainable for testers.
“This is just the latest example of how custom feeds on the social web can be used for all sorts of use cases — video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, messaging, etc. — that have been the exclusive domain of the large walled gardens,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue informed TechCrunch by way of e mail. “We’re still early days but things are moving super fast here, especially 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 ultimate step is accomplished, the feed will show movies from the folks the customers themselves comply with.
After Bluesky on Sunday shipped its native customized video feed, which employs a brand new TikTok-style person interface, Surf adopted that design for its feed, as nicely. (Observe: in the event you’re not seeing the TikTok-style interface on Bluesky, attempt restarting your cell app a number of occasions.)
Should you’re not ready to make use of Surf, which remains to be in non-public beta, you need to use its feed straight on Bluesky. Surf federated its new customized video feed to Blueksy the place it’s obtainable 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, much like TikTok’s BookTok group. This feed may 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 may exist on different apps in addition to Bluesky, if you use the feed on Surf itself, you’ll be capable to see movies from different companies 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.
