After the TikTok ban went into effect on Sunday, social network Bluesky launched a custom feed for videos on its platform. Now, Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, which is dedicated to browsing the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of that move to introduce a video feed of its own.
Initially, Surf’s video feed was a combination of video posts on Bluesky’s “trending video” feed and those posts that included the hashtag #SkyTok. The company says it will soon personalize its feed to the end user, too.
This will help differentiate Surf’s video feed from Bluesky’s own. It also represents the power that comes from allowing third parties to build feeds for a social networking platform. Surf is currently 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 sorts of use cases — video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, messaging, etc. — that have been the exclusive domain of the large walled gardens,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. “We’re still early days but things are moving super fast 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 custom feed) as a source for the feed. This is also filtered to show only video posts. When this final step is completed, the feed will display videos from the people the users themselves follow.
After Bluesky on Sunday shipped its native custom video feed, which employs 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 on Bluesky, try restarting your mobile app a few times.)
If you’re not able to use Surf, which is still in private beta, you can use its feed directly on Bluesky. Surf federated its new custom video feed to Blueksy where it’s available as another native, custom feed option.
McCue points out that Surf itself can be used to make different kinds of video feeds, too.
For example, he also built a “BookTok” type feed, which focuses on users discussing books on video, similar to TikTok’s BookTok community. This feed can be viewed on both Surf and Bluesky.
To make this feed, McCue included all videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
However, because those tags could exist on other apps besides Bluesky, when you use the feed on Surf itself, you’ll be able to see videos from other services like 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 powered by protocols like ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), the AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.
