I downloaded and registered for a Flipboard account way back when it was first created. At that time, it was just a news aggregator that felt more like a magazine because of how the page turn animations worked. It was nice because at that time there were no issues with entire articles getting fed into the reader, and it was a dream come true for iPad users in the early days.

These days, you can only read the first few sentences of an from the app and then you have to tap a link to go to the actual, often cookie-walled, website to read any more of the article.

On top of that, people who post comments in Flipboard tend to get insanely toxic. Like facebook-levels of insane hot takes.

For those reason, I don’t really interact with it as much and I’ve considered removing it from time to time. The reason I don’t is because I’m curious about how this fediverse thing will work out for it.

Before podcasts, there used to be RSS readers. They let you quickly subscribe and scan a lot of blogs and catch up on latest posts. Flipboard started as a fancy mobile app version, with access to articles from mainstream news providers.

It's grown and changed a lot, but it's essentially a quick way to scan for interesting daily news.

They've now added ways to subscribe and catch up on Fediverse sources like Mastodon (and soon, Lemmy).

The CEO has a podcast called Dot Social where he talks to people about how this Fediverse stuff all fits together: https://dot-social.simplecast.com/

Indeed, not that difficult.

I vaguely remember using it like 10 years ago when it got pre-loaded on a Samsung Tablet I bought… fun times…

It seemed to me like a combination of a news app and a social network