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browse It is an application that is a little difficult to explain. He’s kind of three things: a client for federal apps like Bluesky and Mastodon; a feed reader that lets you subscribe to almost any website, podcast, or YouTube channel; And a tool for creating and following feeds of interesting content, similar to Flipboard magazines. It’s a browser for the federated world, or for the open social web, if any of those phrases mean anything to you. It’s also one of the most compelling ideas you’ll find about the future of the Internet.
after More than a year in betaSurf will officially launch on Thursday. Right now, the only public experience is online (mobile apps are in beta), with what Cerf calls “social media sites.” Edge is one of Surf’s launch partners, and we’ve built a portfolio of these sites. If you go to, say, the Decryption page On Surf, you’ll be able to find all the latest episodes of the show, along with a bunch of social chatter about the show. Anyone can post to the community just using a hashtag (if nothing else, Surf is a big bet on hashtags as a way to organize the internet), and feed moderators can control what people see and how they see it.
You can sign up for Surf with a Mastodon or Bluesky account, and you can also sign up for both and then create a Surf account to manage everything. Once you’re in, you can start searching and organizing content — Flipboard says its search includes billions of posts across ActivityPub (the open protocol that powers Mastodon), AT Protocol (the open protocol that powers Bluesky), and the web. In the end, you don’t have to worry about protocols at all; Flipboard’s mission is to bring all content together regardless of its source. All you have to do is follow feeds curated by other people, or create and share your own.
This is where everything starts to get a little tense. If you clicked the heart button to like a post on Surf, then so do you In reality Like this content from your social account. If you leave a comment, you are actually responding to this post with a post of your own. Add something to your Surf feed and maybe create a Mastodon post to do so. This is the federal diversity infrastructure and it’s both very exciting and very confusing. There’s something incredibly compelling about the idea of having one account to post everywhere, rather than managing accounts and communities across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest, but everyone is still figuring out how that’s actually supposed to work.
One way to think about federated social networks is that there are huge, organized databases of things people post — all the links, selfies, jokes, videos, and whatever else, all go into the database. Most social apps so far have chosen to present this database as a dense Twitter-style timeline. Surf does it differently: It displays video feeds first with large previews and built-in players, turns your podcast feed into something resembling a podcast player, and displays links in a Flipboard-style magazine. (One of the coolest things about Surf in general is sorting feeds by content type; search for, say, “SNL clips,” then hit the video tab, and you’ll get an endless feed of stuff, curated by the folks at Bluesky and Mastodon.)
I’ve been beta testing Surf almost since the beginning, and while there are some things about it — and about Federation in general — that still feel a little overwhelming, there’s also something powerful about the way this platform works. Using it feels like scrolling TikTok, except instead of trusting the algorithm, my feed is curated by smart people on the internet. Sure, the Flipboard team is trying to create a platform and business out of Surf, but the system is still open by design; Even if Surf were to disappear, the content on the platform would still be there. At a time when platforms seem more fragile and unknown than ever, Surf feels like a good step in a different direction.