Surf, the new app from Flipboard for looking the open social net, is making it simpler for folks to create and uncover their very own customized feeds targeted on their pursuits. As an alternative of getting caught in an algorithmically generated timeline designed by a social community’s proprietor, customized feeds help you construct an expertise targeted on belongings you truly care about, like your favourite hobbies, sports activities, communities, or every other subjects you need to comply with.

With Thursday’s introduction of Starter Units, Surf is simplifying the method of constructing these customized feeds, personalizing them, and even publishing them off-platform, if you happen to select.

Making feed creation simpler permits extra folks to take management of their social media expertise and wrest management of their feeds again from tech giants like Meta and Google. Startups like Graze and SkyFeed already let Bluesky customers build their own custom feeds, however these instruments are designed with extra technical customers in thoughts, not essentially a mainstream social media client.

Starter Units, alternatively, are geared toward anybody who needs to strive their hand at feed-building however isn’t positive how you can start.

Launched late last year into an invite-only beta, Surf is part two of Flipboard’s authentic mission to curate the online. The corporate’s flagship Flipboard app had allowed folks to gather and manage posts from blogs, information web sites, and mainstream social media providers, which have been become customized magazines. However as social providers (like X) locked down their APIs, limiting entry to their content material, Flipboard regarded to the open social net as a substitute. That in the end led to the creation of a brand new app, with Surf.

Surf enables you to curate and discover feeds that embrace the content material from social networks constructed on open protocols, like Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and others, together with Meta’s newest app, Threads, in addition to content material from blogs, podcasts, YouTube movies, information websites, or anything with an RSS feed.

The brand new Starter Units, created by its staff, are organized round common classes and pre-populated with beneficial sources.

As an example, if you happen to select to begin a “Hobbies” feed, you possibly can faucet on that class after which search for sources so as to add throughout plenty of subtopics, like biking, gaming, Legos, books, baking, climbing, dancing, guitar, comics, crusing, and rather more.

Plus, you possibly can add your personal social account feed from both Mastodon or Bluesky and have it filtered by the chosen matter. You can too use the search bar so as to add particular sources of your personal, then use further instruments to filter these sources so that they’ll solely embrace posts that match the feed’s matter. (This could possibly be helpful in case your favourite tech pundit additionally actively posts about politics, for instance, however you solely need to observe what they must say about tech.)

One other newer characteristic enables you to publish your customized feed to Bluesky.

To take action, faucet the three-dot menu on the feed’s header, then faucet “Publish to Bluesky,” and the feed will seem within the Feeds tab of your Bluesky profile. (This feed will solely embrace Bluesky content material when considered on Bluesky’s app, nevertheless.)

Surf remains to be invite-only however commonly provides from its waitlist.