Surfing Together

Welcome to the Surf Blog! When we have product updates, new features rolling out or cool community developments, we’ll use the blog to share our progress with you. For this first post, we want to take a step back and explain why we’re building Surf and what we hope it brings to the world. 

Surf, built by the team at Flipboard, is in many ways the extension of the mission we’ve been on since the beginning. Flipboard’s first product, appropriately named, Flipboard, launched as a ‘social magazine’ that let people flip through stories people, publishers and brands were sharing across IG, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Twitter. It was beautiful and immersive, like a magazine of the stories people were sharing. But not long after launch the Big Tech companies closed their gardens and shut off their APIs, making it impossible for users to add their social media to their Flipboard. And so for a decade we turned our attention to partnering directly with publishers, delivering curated content for our users, but we always longed to bring people together around those stories. 

So when we saw the fediverse and learned about Activity Pub, we knew we had another shot at the vision for communities connected around the content they love. So we set out to build Surf, a social browser for the open web that lets people create social feeds for the conversations they want to follow and the topics they want to learn about.

Surf has been in a mobile app beta for a year, allowing us to build out a robust backend that can surface the wide array of content people care about by integrating with both Activity Pub and ATProto social networks, YouTube content, RSS feeds and podcasts. Simultaneously the design and client teams blended the best of Flipboard UX with the powerful features for moderation and customization that these protocols allowed. The resulting product has evolved often, sometimes with several new versions in a single week. But with thousands of beta testers and more than 15,000 feeds created, we decided to embark on the desktop web, our most requested next step.

Today we’re rolling out the web version of Surf, still in beta, but the first product to give people a simple way to search what people are talking about and join communities on the open social web. Try it out at surf.social, send us your feedback at support@surf.social, and please share the feeds you create or the fun you’re having with us at Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads. Enjoy the ride!