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After the ban on TikTok came into force on Sunday, the social network Bluesky launched a custom feed for videos on its platform. now, Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, which is dedicated to navigating the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, 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 #SkyTok hashtag. The company says it will soon customize its feed to end users 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 build feeds for a social networking platform. Surf is currently in beta with a registration list available for interested testers.
“This is just the latest example of how personalized feeds on the social web can be used for all kinds of use cases – video sharing, photo sharing, newsgroups, messaging, etc. – that are been the exclusive domain of the great walled gardens,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. “It’s still early days, but things are moving super fast here, especially in AT Proto (the protocol that powers Bluesky).”
To customize the new surf video feed, McCue said the company will soon add a user’s 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 show videos from people that the users themselves follow.
Afterwards Bluesky on Sunday shipped its native custom video feedwhich employs a new TikTok-style user interface, Surf has also adopted that design for its feed. (Note: If you don’t see the TikTok-style interface in Bluesky, try restarting your mobile app a few times.)
If you can’t use Surf, which is still in private beta, you can use it it feeds directly onto Bluesky. Surf has federated its new custom video feed to Blueksy where it is available as another native custom feed option.
McCue points out that the Surf itself can also be used to make different types of video feeds.
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 seen on both Surf and Bluesky.
To make this feed, McCue included all the videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
However, because those tags may exist in other apps besides Bluesky, when you use the feed on Surf itself, you will be able to see videos from other services such as YouTube, Threads and Mastodon, in addition to the videos from Bluesky. It is possible because Surf allows users to explore many social networks in its app, including those powered by protocols such as ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), the AT Protocol (used by Bluesky) and RSS.
