Now it’s up to the social magazine app Flipboard to try to bring more news sources to the open social web, which is also called the fediverse. The companies that run Press.coop, a service that made mirror accounts of major news outlets like Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even this blog, revealed Thursday that they have moved their collection of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard.
A fediverse company called Hello.coop, which is run by Dick Hardt, started Press.coop a year ago. Like many others, he wanted more news to be available in the fediverse, especially on Mastodon, the rival to Twitter/X, where many top writers had not yet set up shop like they had on Twitter/X. To meet this need, Press.coop copied the publishers’ Twitter/X accounts, so their comments could be seen on the wider open social web.
But that access was cut off when Twitter changed the rules for its API and raised the price. After that, Press.coop switched to mirroring companies’ RSS feeds.
A lot of people liked these fake accounts, even though they were just bots that shared the publishers’ news as soon as it appeared in their own news feeds. One account that got 10,000 press.coop fans was NPR. Some saw smaller groups of followers.
Moving the accounts to Flipboard isn’t an official relationship or acquisition, but it’s a good business move for everyone involved: news readers, publishers, and Flipboard. It also gives Hardt more time to work on other projects.
The last few months have seen Flipboard take more steps to become a shared app. After saying it would connect to the fediverse and ActivityPub, the protocol that runs Mastodon and other federated apps, Flipboard let its users follow Mastodon accounts from within the app. They could also follow and interact with people on the open social web and the other way around. Its creator-built news magazines can now be read by people on the fediverse, which makes them more accessible.
Flipboard also brought its own editing work to Mastodon when it launched news “desks” in 2023. These were human-run accounts that were used to keep up with stories in tech, culture, science, and other areas. All of these now post daily on Mastodon from Flipboard.social, the company’s own Mastodon server.
Adding the press.coop accounts builds on what was done before. Publishers on Flipboard’s app will be able to see activity in their Flipboard notifications if they use these federated Flipboard accounts. Also, the people who already follow them on Flipboard will be combined with the people who follow them on press.coop, which will increase their reach.
Hardt said on the service’s website that Press.coop would be shutting down on Thursday.
The site says, “We saw that Flipboard was giving the fediverse a lot of the same content, so we’ve decided to work with them and move all press.coop accounts to the new flipboard.com publisher account or a flipboard.social account for those who aren’t already on Flipboard.” By the end of the month, the transfer should be done.
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