After the ban on TikTok took effect on Sunday, social network Bluesky launched a special feed for videos on the platform. Now, Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, which is dedicated to exploring the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of the move to introduce its own video feed. First, Surf’s video feed is a combination of video posts on Bluesky’s “trending videos” feed and those posts include the #SkyTok hashtag. The company says it will make feeds to end users as well. This will help differentiate Surf’s video feed from Bluesky itself. It also represents the power of allowing third parties to create feeds for social networking platforms. Surf is now in beta with a sign-up list available for interested testers. “This is just the latest example of how custom feeds on the social web can be used for all kinds of use cases – video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, messaging, etc. – that have been the exclusive domain of large walled gardens. , “Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. “We are still early, but things are happening very quickly here, especially in the AT Proto [the protocol that powers Bluesky.]”To personalize the new Surf video feed, McCue said the company will soon add users’ Bluesky Following timeline (which is just another custom feed) as a source for the feed. It is also filtered to only show video posts. If this last step is completed, the feed will display videos of the people you follow. After Bluesky posted the original custom video feed, which uses the new TikTok-style user interface, Surf also uses the same design for the feed. (Note: if you don’t see the TikTok-style interface in Bluesky, try restarting the app cellular you multiple times.) Image Credit: screenshot of BookTok Surf If you can’t use Surf, which is still in beta, you can use the live feed in Bluesky. Surf makes a new custom video feed available as an option other custom feeds Image Credit: Surf’s BookTok feed, when viewed on Bluesky McCue shows that Surf itself can also be used to create multiple video feeds. For example, they also created a “BookTok” type feed, which focuses on users discussing books on video, similar to TikTok’s BookTok community. This feed can be viewed on Surf and Bluesky. To create this feed, McCue included all the videos tagged #BookTok and #BookSky. However, since these tags may be in other applications besides Bluesky, when you use the feed in Surf itself, you will see videos from other services like YouTube, Threads, and Mastodon, in addition to videos from Bluesky. This is possible because Surf allows users to explore various social networks within the application, including those supported by protocols like ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.
