Flipboard is the latest service
to embrace Mastodon as Twitter becomes increasingly chaotic under Elon Musk. The news reading app, whose founder was once on Twitter’s board of directors, is now going all in on the Fediverse.
The company announced that it’s
integrating Mastodon into its main app, so that users can browse their feeds much the way they can “flip” through their Twitter timelines. Flipboard is also starting up its own
Mastodon instance in an effort to encourage broader adoption among its user base.
According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, the two updates are the first “very initial steps” of a broader plan to embrace the decentralized social networking protocols that have been popularized by Mastodon over the last year. Instead of relying on the “proprietary social graphs” of services like Twitter and Facebook — both of which have become increasingly
hostile to outside developers — Flipboard could instead be centered around ActivityPub, the open source protocol that powers Mastodon and
the rest of the decentralized services that make up the “Fediverse.”