Note: several of the links used in this article point to resources only available in Surf’s app. Surf does not yet have a Web version, nor does it have a desktop app. The app utilizes a custom URI handler; we apologize to readers who can’t see anything at those links.

Recently, Flipboard unveiled Surf to beta testers. It’s a new experience designed around discovery and curation, giving users the ability to create and follow custom feeds that integrate the Fediverse, Bluesky, RSS, and YouTube. It’s a radically different design compared to other Fediverse clients,

A Social Browser

The company refers to Surf as a “Social Browser”, and the design language is incredibly evocative of mobile Web browsers. Instead of parsing HTML pages, Surf browses streams of data, collecting and rendering many different kinds of content into feeds.

Browsing and curating feeds in the app is super simple, and Surf launches with a lot of different topic hubs to choose from.

Individual feeds break down content into separate tabs: Watch, Discuss, Read, Listen, and Look. A well-curated feed breaks up videos into Watch, statuses into Discuss, articles into Read, podcasts into Listen, and photos into Look. It’s a really cool way to explore different topics while tapping into the latest updates the Social Web has to offer.

As stated before, Surf also doubles as a Fediverse client, making it possible to easily share everything directly to your network – including content fetched from RSS and other platforms . You can also follow Fediverse-enabled sources, and reply directly to their posts. In fact, using Surf requires you to sign in with your existing Fediverse identity to use the service.

This becomes even more noticeable with the “Discuss” tab, which can pull statuses from ActivityPub and AT Proto sources. You can use Surf to respond to any ActivityPub-enabled account. Here’s what our site looks like with that integration.

It’s a little bit wonky, partially because we need to keep working on our integration, but it’s already possible to follow ActivityPub-enabled blogs and respond to articles through their native commenting systems.

Building Custom Feeds

In addition to acting as a feed reader and a social app, Surf offers the ability for any person to build their own custom feed. In my experiments, I’ve built three custom feeds so far: Fediverse Newswire , Linux Evolution , Voices of Progress.

Each feed pulls a couple dozen sources to create comprehensive hubs with videos, podcasts, articles, and social statuses. This is particularly great for when you have a lot of different publications writing about a particular subject, because you can keep tabs on the latest developments in that space.

For the most part, adding sources is really easy. Anything you look for in search, including search queries themselves, can be saved as sources. You can even roll other feeds into your own Custom Feed as a source, if you really want to.

Current Limitations

In my initial testing, I found two major gripes with Surf: looking up Fediverse accounts, and exerting greater control over my custom feeds. Neither of these are necessarily deal-breakers, but they are worth pointing out.

Just Look Me Up!

The first problem involves a basic UX issue: you can’t easily search for specific Fediverse users. More often than not, I found people’s corresponding Bluesky accounts and YouTube channels.

The search function doesn’t include a Webfinger lookup, which made it much harder to find the exact people I wanted to include in my Fediverse Newswire feed.

To me, this is a major headache, as I was able to find Bluesky and Threads accounts with relative ease. I was able to get in a few PeerTube channels and our site’s ActivityPub actor, but the experience left me feeling frustrated.

Feed Curation

Surf’s other major headache involves the built-in feed curation and customization tools. For the average user trying to cast a broad net around topics, it’s not bad. For power users wanting greater control, the experience is a bit of a mess.

Here’s the thing: people on social networks rarely ever just post about one topic from their accounts. For feed curation, it’s very important that content appearing in it stays on topic. To Flipboard’s credit, they do include some handyThe filters and a “Stay on Topic” option, but you can only choose from existing topics. You can’t create your own.

Surf’s Exclusion Filters are really, really good, but I would love to see an inverse filter dictating what things should be specifically included in a feed. MissKey and its many derivatives utilize a concept called Antennas, which let you chain together a bunch of tags into a single topic, and it’s brilliant.

You’re Not My Type

The other aspect of feed curation that’s really frustrating at the moment involves how the app breaks different pieces of content into separate feed tabs. It’s something that seems like it should work automatically, but there’s some weird hiccups that sometimes results in content being put in the wrong place.

My best guess is that the app tries to parse different pieces of content based on things like HTML tags, RSS media enclosures, OpenGraph metadata, and other various pieces of information so many webmasters have to set up for publications. For articles that do show up correctly, Surf sometimes mangles article thumbnails in a way that’s pretty similar to how Flipboard does. In all the time I’ve worked on publishing through Flipboard, I usually have to correct article thumbs 9 times out of 10.

It would be really great if we could specify which sources should go to which tab, and maybe even choose the correct thumbnails or previews on sources that don’t work out of the box. Right now, this feels like a point of unnecessary friction.

The Bottom Line

Despite its current shortcomings, Surf is really fun to use. Modeling a social feed reader into a browser feels like a stroke of genius, and the potential of an easy discovery tool feels obvious. When it works, it’s a brilliant experience.

The Fediverse is in a really interesting place at the moment, as a number of projects are focusing on ways to tackle the discovery problem. Mastodon hopes to produce a spec for Fediverse Discovery Providers, while Newsmast is building out custom feed functionality with Patchwork.

My hope is that Surf and other projects will be able to mutually benefit from shared efforts, and even provide some of their code and documentation to the rest of the network to make the experience even smoother. There’s a lot of promise here.

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