Surf, the new app from Flipboard for browsing the open social web, is making it easier for people to create and discover their own custom feeds focused on their interests. Instead of getting stuck in an algorithmically generated timeline designed by a social network’s owner, custom feeds allow you to build an experience focused on things you actually care about, like your favorite hobbies, sports, communities, or any other topics you want to follow.
With Thursday’s introduction of Starter Sets, Surf is simplifying the process of building those custom feeds, personalizing them, and even publishing them off-platform, if you choose.
Making feed creation easier allows more people to take control of their social media experience and wrest control of their feeds back from tech giants like Meta and Google. Startups like Graze and SkyFeed already let Bluesky users build their own custom feeds, but those tools are designed with more technical users in mind, not necessarily a mainstream social media consumer.
Starter Sets, on the other hand, are aimed at anyone who wants to try their hand at feed-building but isn’t sure how to begin.
Launched late last year into an invite-only beta, Surf is phase two of Flipboard’s original mission to curate the web. The company’s flagship Flipboard app had allowed people to collect and organize posts from blogs, news websites, and mainstream social media services, which were turned into custom magazines. But as social services (like X) locked down their APIs, limiting access to their content, Flipboard looked to the open social web instead. That ultimately led to the creation of a new app, with Surf.
Surf lets you curate and explore feeds that include the content from social networks built on open protocols, like Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and others, including Meta’s latest app, Threads, as well as content from blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, news sites, or anything else with an RSS feed.
The new Starter Sets, created by its team, are organized around popular categories and pre-populated with recommended sources.
For instance, if you choose to start a “Hobbies” feed, you can tap on that category and then look for sources to add across a number of subtopics, like cycling, gaming, Legos, books, baking, hiking, dancing, guitar, comics, sailing, and much more.
Plus, you can add your own social account feed from either Mastodon or Bluesky and have it filtered by the chosen topic. You can also use the search bar to add specific sources of your own, then use additional tools to filter those sources so they’ll only include posts that match the feed’s topic. (This could be handy if your favorite tech pundit also actively posts about politics, for example, but you only want to track what they have to say about tech.)
Another newer feature lets you publish your custom feed to Bluesky.
To do so, tap the three-dot menu on the feed’s header, then tap “Publish to Bluesky,” and the feed will appear in the Feeds tab of your Bluesky profile. (This feed will only include Bluesky content when viewed on Bluesky’s app, however.)
Surf is still invite-only but regularly adds from its waitlist.
