Flipboard will allow you to follow fediverse accounts directly within the app

Flipboard is delivering on a big Fediverse promise. Late last year, at the same time it announced it would move user accounts to ActivityPub, Flipboard said it planned to allow users to follow users on federated platforms who used ActivityPub from within the Flipboard app. As of Tuesday, this feature is here, meaning you can follow people from places like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed right on Flipboard.

Flipboard will present fediverse profiles in a few different ways in the app. Flipboard’s search will show diverse accounts, for example, while the Explore tab will have editorially curated recommendations, according to a press release. In a screenshot shared by Flipboard, the Explore section has a “Fediverse” tab filled with profiles like Border says Threads editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Mike Masnick’s Mastodon accountand you can follow these accounts with one tap.

While you can see posts from federated accounts on other platforms, you won’t be able to reply to or like those Flipboard posts unless your Flipboard account is also federated, which may not be the case for everyone. Flipboard has only enabled this for a few accounts so far, and if yours isn’t already federated, you can request it to happen, said Flipboard’s Marci McCue. The edge.

Still, Flipboard’s fediverse expansion could make the app a one-stop shop for your news and social media posts from the people who interest you most. I’m intrigued by the idea; I usually keep my article feeds and social feeds in separate apps, but I can see how it might be useful to combine the two.

Flipboard has openly supported the federation. The company created its own instance of Mastodon (Flipboard.social) in 2023, and CEO Mike McCue written and talked about how important he thinks the federation is. But thanks to things like this Flipboard update and the newly added ability in Threads to see replies to your federated posts, the big promises of federated social networks are becoming more of a reality.