He says the company no longer has a contact at Twitter in the event of any API issues, though it hasn’t yet experienced a major disruption. “We don’t know how much longer this is going to stay alive,” said Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, about the app’s Twitter integration. Flipboard, which began its life as a social magazine where users could read their news feeds alongside updates from social apps like Twitter, knows that its time with Twitter may now be limited.

The company understands its longtime Twitter integration may become unreliable with Twitter’s API changes under Elon Musk, which has already impacted a range of third-party apps –– including many Twitter clients. Other companies weighing Fediverse integrations include Tumblr and Flickr, both of which have discussed adding support for ActivityPub, as well.įor Flipboard, the new Mastodon integration serves to plug up a potential hole in its service. The news follows a similar announcement from the blogging platform Medium, which last month launched its own Mastodon community for its authors. But Flipboard says, over time, it aims to onboard more users into the Fediverse through its instance. It also plans to support ActivityPub, the underlying protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated apps.Īccess to the new instance, for the time being, will be limited to Flipboard curators on an invite-only basis. But the company’s Fediverse ambitions extend beyond a product integration as Flipboard is launching its own Mastodon instance, flipboard.social, to provide an easy way for Flipboard users and magazine curators to participate in the decentralized web. Starting today, the Flipboard app for iOS will include a beta feature that will allow Mastodon users to visually flip through their timeline to view posts from the people they follow, much like they’ve been able to do with Twitter.

Magazine app Flipboard is joining the Fediverse - the group of interconnected servers powering a range of open source, decentralized applications, including the newly popular Twitter alternative Mastodon.

Flipboard magazine