After the TikTok ban went into effect on Sunday, social media platform Bluesky launched a custom video feed on its site. Now, Flipboard’s new app, Surf, dedicated to browsing the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of that move to launch its own video feed.
Initially, Surf’s video feed was a combination of video posts from Bluesky’s “trending videos” feed and those posts that included the hashtag #SkyTok. The company says it will soon add its feed to end users, too.
This will help separate Surf’s video feed from Bluesky’s. It also represents the power that comes from allowing third parties to create social media feeds. Surf is currently in beta with a subscription list available for interested testers.
“This is the latest example of how custom feeds on the social web can be used for all kinds of uses – video sharing, photo sharing, chat groups, messaging, etc. – which was the exclusive center of the great walled gardens. ,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. “It’s still early days but things are moving very quickly here, especially in the AT Proto [the protocol that powers Bluesky.]”
To personalize Surf’s new video feed, McCue said the company will soon add users’ Bluesky Following timeline (another custom feed) as a feed source. This is also filtered to show only video posts. When this last step is completed, the feed will show videos from the following users themselves.
After Bluesky on Sunday launched its traditional video feed, which uses a new TikTok-style user interface, Surf adopted that design for its feed. (Note: if you don’t see the TikTok-style interface in Bluesky, try restarting your mobile app a few times.)
If you can’t use Surf, which is in private beta, you can use its feed directly from Bluesky. Surf has shared its new custom video feed on Blueksy where it is available as another native, custom feed option.
McCue points out that Surf itself can be used to create different types of video feeds, too.
For example, he also created the “BookTok” feed, which focuses on users discussing books in video, similar to TikTok’s BookTok community. This feed can be viewed on both Surf and Bluesky.
To make this feed, McCue included all the videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
However, because these tags can be present in other applications besides Bluesky, if you use the feed in Surf itself, you will be able to see videos from other services such as YouTube, Threads, and Mastodon, in addition to videos from Bluesky. That’s possible because Surf allows users to explore multiple social networks in its app, including those supported by protocols such as ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.