Flipboard is making good on a major fediverse promise. Late last year, at the same time it announced it would be switching user accounts to ActivityPub, Flipboard said it planned to let users follow users on federated platforms that used ActivityPub from the Flipboard app. Starting Tuesday, that feature is here, meaning that you can follow people from places like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed right inside Flipboard.
I downloaded and registered for a Flipboard account way back when it was first created. At that time, it was just a news aggregator that felt more like a magazine because of how the page turn animations worked. It was nice because at that time there were no issues with entire articles getting fed into the reader, and it was a dream come true for iPad users in the early days.
These days, you can only read the first few sentences of an from the app and then you have to tap a link to go to the actual, often cookie-walled, website to read any more of the article.
On top of that, people who post comments in Flipboard tend to get insanely toxic. Like facebook-levels of insane hot takes.
For those reason, I don’t really interact with it as much and I’ve considered removing it from time to time. The reason I don’t is because I’m curious about how this fediverse thing will work out for it.
you have to tap a link to go to the actual, often cookie-walled, website
Kind of like how RSS/Atom is not useful anymore. Most feeds don’t contain the actual articles, in an attempt to increase clicks and ad revenue. That’s just sad, I miss the old internet.
There are some RSS readers that will download the actual URL and apply “reader mode” on the page to present the full article. I think FreshRSS has such a plugin.
