Surf's Up
David Pierce on the beta launch of Surf, a new product focused on the Fediverse – or "social web" as Flipboard co-founder Mike McCue prefers we call it (to make it less nerdy and more accessible):
At the same time, though, the Flipboard team has been working on something even bigger. That something is an app called Surf (not to be confused with the other recently launched Surf), which McCue called “the world’s first browser for the social web.” He first said that to me a little over a year ago, when Surf was mostly just a bunch of mock-ups and a slide deck. Now, the app has been in beta for the last few months — I’ve been using it most of that time — and a public beta is launching today. Not everyone can get in; McCue says he wants to bring in some curators and creators first, in order for there to be lots of stuff in Surf when everyone else gets access. And he promises that’s coming soon.
But wait, sorry, back to the whole “browser for the social web” thing. McCue’s best explanation of Surf’s big theory is this: in a decentralized social world, the internet will be less about websites and more about feeds. “You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.
It's early – perhaps too early – but there are some compelling ideas here. First and foremost, building a product around the concept of following feeds rather than people. This has been tried a lot over the years, of course, but there's a reason that products and startups keep coming back to it: the idea of following individuals worked well in the early days of social because it was a much smaller pond, but these days, when Meta's products have 3 billion+ active users, that's obviously untenable. Worse, because Xitter has been molting and has flung a lot of its former user base (or at least amongst those I followed) to various other social corners of the web, you can see just how much work it is to try to find and follow individuals on all of these services. Not to mentions new ones that still pop-up from time to time. It almost feels like following an individual should only be for a handful of accounts you truly love or want to keep up with in real time (sort of how alerts or notifications were used on Twitter back in the day) and the new default following mechanism should be topic-based.
But again, many have tried that – even Twitter itself to varying degrees over the years. What's new – or at least seemingly working now – is the concept of following "packs" of feeds. This has been a key feature of Bluesky and it's smart. It tackles the cold start problem in a way that Twitter never could crack. It's so smart that Meta immediately copied it, as is their wont to do. Beyond being interest-based, the real key is that others can make and share these. Some people really care about this type of curation and seem to get joy from helping others navigate the feeds through their packs. Surf is trying to do that but for many types of feeds – all the way down to RSS, the cockroach of the web – not just one social network.
And that's important here because while the Fediverse is showing some early signs of opening the web again, even it is fragmented at the moment, with Bluesky's own open protocol competing with the one Mastodon, Threads, and others are using. Surf is smartly trying to bridge those two worlds in particular.
A feed can be made up of almost any kind of content, which presents a tricky design problem for Surf. It has to be equally adept as a social network, a news app, a video platform, and a podcast player. Combining all that stuff into one place isn’t just the goal; it’s the whole point. And it’s very hard to do all of those things well.
Personally, the most eye-opening moment in my time testing Surf has been the way the app lets you automatically filter a feed. I set up a feed that’s just all my favorite stuff: my go-to podcasts, must-read blogs, a couple of can’t-miss YouTube channels, and my favorite folks on Bluesky. I can open that feed and see everything, in order, no matter what it is or who it came from. But I can also filter it to just show all the videos in the feed or tap on “Listen” to turn it into a podcast queue.
The filtering does seem quite good and useful – and draws from the years of filtration work on Flipboard itself. This can hopefully get around the old "stick to sports" problem, where you follow someone for a certain type of content, but then they start spouting off about something else. Like myself back in the day with Michigan Football – #GoBlue – when people just wanted Apple takes or whatnot. Again, not following individuals will help with this, but the feeds themselves now will have less wiggle room when it comes to straying off topic.
They also, of course, need to solve the "dupe" problem which the aforementioned fragmentation of Twitter has made 1,000x worse:
Because it’s trying to compile a bunch of disparate platforms into one, search can be messy — I found five profiles with my name and picture, for instance, and it’s not obvious which one is the one you’re looking for. Surf is also designed to be interactive, but right now, that pretty much only works if you’re a Mastodon user liking Mastodon posts. For most other things, it’s either kind of broken or entirely broken. For now, and probably for a while, Surf is going to be much better as a consumption tool than a social one.
Again, I worry this is all still too early to work at any sort of interesting scale at the moment. But the timing certainly feels better than it did even last year at this point thanks to the rise of Bluesky and the continued surging of Threads as Xitter seems more focused on, well, other things. Naturally, there are several other players working in tangential spaces now, from Tapestry from Iconfactory to the new Reeder by Silvio Rizzi – the developer of my still-used RSS reader of choice. Both of those new products are newfangled readers of sorts, though more focused on the bespoke following model versus Surf's feeds. But each are trying to tackle the same noise and fragmentation issue of our current age.
McCue is practically giddy as he scrolls through all this basketball content. This is the whole thing, right here. “Ultimately,” he says, “you’re just not going to care whether something is on Threads — I don’t write you a separate kind of email because you’re on Gmail, right?” People will use lots of apps, there will be lots of communities, and that’s good. “There are nerds on Bluesky, there are nerds on Threads. How can all the nerds gather together?” That’s the question for the fediverse — sorry, the social web — and Surf looks like it might be the best answer anyone’s come up with so far.
I've only had the app for a day or so, but you can quickly see what it's trying to do and how it can be compelling after just a few minutes of usage. I made a 'Beer' feed, which I was quickly able to populate with some feeds that Surf recommended – it's pretty good! Even better is a 'Retro Computing' one that McCue himself made and clearly put more time into. Again, that's the thing: it puts the onus on the feed creators now – who are really curators. Flipboard has been doing this for a long time with their 'Magazine' concept, but I think marrying that to these newer concepts is smart.
The real question mark, as Pierce notes, will be with content creation. Surf is good for well, surfing – you can post (to Mastodon at the moment), but it feels like an after-thought. Perhaps Threads continued pushing for replies/conversation will help here, as Surf could be a good reply tool. But original posting will remain key to keep the content flowing in those feeds – perhaps there's something to be done with unified posting to all these services from one place?
In a way, I'm reminded of two old school things I loved and miss: FriendFeed and Twitter Lists. The former was an early attempt to unify a very different social web before that team took their talents to Facebook and elsewhere! The latter are the main reason I still use Xitter, but the those feeds that I made years ago are getting worse with time as the accounts that populate them go elsewhere. Again, one of the trends that Surf is riding.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler