Instagram Threads users are gaining a new audience. On Tuesday, the social magazine app Flipboard took another step toward integrating with ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking protocol that powers services like Mastodon, PixelFed, PeerTube and others. Starting Tuesday, Flipboard users can follow any federated accounts, meaning those that participate in the social network of interconnected servers known as the fediverse. This now includes Threads accounts in addition to Mastodon accounts and others.
With the update, which deepens Flipboard’s connection with the ActivityPub social graph, any Flipboard user can follow user profiles from any other federated service. If their Flipboard account is also federated, they can interact with those users’ posts and participate in conversations, as well.
Flipboard’s user base, however, is currently undisclosed. The app, first founded in 2010 as a social magazine experience, where users curate content from around the web, has more recently taken on new life as a participant in the fediverse. After losing its ability to integrate with X, formerly Twitter, following API changes at the Elon Musk-run company, Flipboard joined the fediverse with a Mastodon integration and said it would work to become a fully federated app itself over time by integrating with the ActivityPub protocol.
Since then, the company has taken steps to bring its content and user profiles to the fediverse. Today, Flipboard has federated 700 curators and publishers and their combined 15,000 magazines. Most of these accounts are in the U.S., but the company is now testing around a dozen more in the U.K. and Germany, it says.
The Flipboard app supports full fediverse integration, but the company hasn’t yet allowed all users to turn on federation as it’s a phased rollout. We’re told the goal is to make federation a setting users can select later this year, similar to how Threads added a “fediverse sharing” option in June. When federation is enabled, people will be able to not only share to the fediverse but also see and engage with conversations around their Flipboard posts that are taking place in the fediverse.
What makes up the fediverse is also changing. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, the idea of a decentralized social platform — one that couldn’t be bought by billionaires and that supported account portability — grew in popularity. With Meta’s adoption of ActivityPub for its newest app, Threads, the movement began to take off. As a result of users’ growing interest in a new social web, WordPress blogs can now also be followed in the fediverse, following parent company Automattic’s acquisition of an ActivityPub plugin. Meanwhile, newsletter platform Ghost, a Substack rival, more recently began work on federation. Mozilla and Medium also set up their own Mastodon servers, known as instances.
With Tuesday’s update on Flipboard, people can find and follow others in the fediverse across three areas of its app: Search, Explore and Community. In search results, Flipboard will surface federated accounts and profile results in a new section, “Fediverse Accounts.” Editorial recommendations can also be found in the app’s “Explore” tab under “Fediverse,” and every week a new selection of accounts will be featured in the Community section. Activity from the fediverse will also be displayed in the Flipboard notifications panel, allowing people to engage and follow others in the fediverse directly from their notifications.
For Flipboard users, that means they can now follow user profiles from Threads and Mastodon in the Flipboard app, including high-profile users like President Joe Biden (POTUS) and former President Barack Obama on Threads, as well as various creators, like Marques Brownlee, and journalists, like Kara Swisher.
