After the TikTok ban went into effect on Sunday, social network Bluesky launched a personalized video feed on its platform. Now Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, which is dedicated to surfing the open social network and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of the move to introduce a video feed of its own.
Initially, Surf’s video feed was a combination of video posts to Bluesky’s “trending videos” feed and those posts that included the #SkyTok hashtag. The company says it will soon customize its feed to the end user as well.
This will help differentiate Surf’s video feed from Bluesky’s. It also represents the power that comes from allowing third parties to create resources for a social networking platform. Surf is currently in beta with a signup list available for interested testers.
“This is just the latest example of how personalized resources 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. “It’s still early days, but things are moving very quickly here, especially on 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 personalized feed) as a source for the feed. This is also filtered to show only video posts. When this last step is complete, the feed will display videos from people who follow the users themselves.
After Bluesky on Sunday sent out its original custom video, which uses a new TikTok-style user interface, Surf adopted that design for its feed as well. (Note: if you’re not seeing the TikTok-style interface in Bluesky, try restarting your mobile app a few times.)
If you’re unable to use Surf, which is still in private beta, you can access its feed directly on Bluesky. Surf has merged the new custom video feed into Blueksy, where it’s available as another custom source option.
McCue points out that Surf itself can also be used to create different types of video resources.
For example, it also built a “BookTok” feed, which focuses on users discussing books in videos, similar to TikTok’s BookTok community. This feed can be viewed on both Surf and Bluesky.
To create this feed, McCue included all the videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
However, because those tags may exist in apps other than Bluesky, when you access the feed in Surf itself, you’ll be able to 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 multiple social networks in its app, including those powered by protocols such as ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.
