Flipboard has recently begun federation, starting with 25 accounts. These accounts can be viewed from Kbin with their posts showing up as microblog posts.
What do you guys think about this? I don’t really know much about Flipboard or its implications for the fediverse, so I’m curious what others think about the matter.
If you’re interested, here are the accounts that have federated:
The Verge — @theverge
Fast Company — @FastCompany
Semafor — @semafor
SPIN — @SPINMag
News Literacy Project — @NewsLitProject
Medium — @Medium
Digiday — @Digiday
ScienceAlert — @ScienceAlert
Polygon — @polygon
Frommers — @FrommersMag
Kotaku — @Kotaku
The 74 — @The74
Pitchfork — @pitchfork
Refinery29 — @Refinery29
Mental Floss — @mental_floss
The Root — @TheRoot
Joysauce — @Joysauce
IndieWire — @IndieWire
LGBTQ Nation — @LGBTQNation
Smithsonian Magazine — @Smithsonianmag
AFAR Media — @AfarMedia
The Christian Science Monitor — @csmonitor
Erin Brockovich — @ErinBrockovich
Canada’s National Observer — @NatObserver
The Conversation (US) — @ConversationUS
This was my point. You shouldn’t need an account on all of these services. You should be able to interact from your single Flipboard account. But its likely that, like most new fediverse services, you were testing mostly (or probably solely) against Mastodon. Despite Flipboard having more in common with link aggregators like kbin/lemmy, yall went for mastodon compatibility first.
A lot of people are worried about large orgs/companies like Flipboard/Meta joining the fediverse and controlling it, but Mastodon itself has been in that position for a long time. It’s controlled and limited the fediverse for a while and people keep reinforcing its control instead of expanding on the fediverse’s plurality.
I agree with you that the fediverse’s plurality is crucial to reinforce right now. This is why integrated with Pixelfed and promoted it to our users early this year. We will be able to introduce people to other services across the fediverse once we’ve completed our activitypub cutover.