brief, first thoughts on Flipboard's Surf app

I don’t remember exactly when I signed up for the beta of Flipboard’s Surf “social web browser”—probably shortly after blogging about it here—but my invite came in, and I finally installed the beta yesterday to give it a look. This isn’t a proper review so much as a few off-the-cuff thoughts based on a few minutes of fiddling around but those thoughts are mixed.

When I first linkblogged about Surf, I said that I wanted to see more apps like this, and trying out the app only reinforces that impression. I think the design of the app is great, and I’m very interested in the way that it seems to work as a client for Mastodon and Bluesky, not just a feed reader that’s Mastodon and Bluesky compatible. The podcast interface looks promising, too, and I just love all of these efforts to break media out of platforms and combine them into single, innovative apps.

That said, I don’t see myself switching over. While the marketing copy about the app mentions adding RSS feeds, it has been really frustrating to figure out how to do that. I appreciate Flipboard’s work as a company to lean into the new social web, but Surf seems to want to make that social web primarily accessible through Flipboard. It’s been a long time since I used the original Flipboard app, but if I remember correctly, that was one of the frustrations that I had with it then—that if Flipboard wasn’t curating a source, it was hard to add it to one’s feed.

For all of the neat features that seem to be present in Surf, the most basic things that I want out of it (importing OPMLs, adding custom RSS, treating it like a feed reader with bonus features) don’t seem to be there—or at least not easily accessible. I do hope Surf goes somewhere, and I do want to see more apps like this emerging, but I think it needs to do RSS right for me to be on board, and I don’t see that here (yet?).

• Flipboard
• Surf
• RSS
• Mastodon
• Bluesky
• Reeder