Flipboard becomes federated app with ActivityPub support

Social magazine application Flipboard has just announced that it will be integrating with ActivityPub to join the decentralised social web. The app is ready to join in with other decentralised apps like Twitter rival Mastodon who have become supported networking protocol.

The change will make Flipboard accounts more discoverable so that can be followed by other millions of followers on other decentralised social networks. The company had initially announced its intention to join the fediverse earlier this year using an API to set up a Mastodon server and observe the response of users.

Previously, Flipboard primarily received its news sources from Twitter X, but it changed and replaced it with Mastodon and BlueSky.

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Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch that, “As we said in the earlier part of this year, we will be embracing ActivityPub into Flipboard and effectively reworking our whole backend to that."

"What we’re announcing on Monday is basically our roadmap for how we will be rolling out ActivityPub, and effectively tearing down the walls around our own walled garden,” he added.

Flipboard users who curate an article or post into a social magazine on the app, with optional 'flip', the action will appear as a post on their new flipboard.com Mastodon account. Posts on Mastodon will include a link to the article being flipped, the user's magazine and the profile page.

Flipboard is one of the several companies embracing decentralised social networks including Meta's Threads which tested ActivityPub last week. WordPress has also become federated, along with Medium and Mozilla, who set up their own servers backed by Mastodon client, Mammoth.