Some thoughts on Surf, Flipboard's fediverse app

I've got access to the beta of the Surf app. Some thoughts:

some stuff I really liked:

• rss works (though no custom URLs yet, just what they already scraped)
• you get lemmy, mastodon, bluesky, threads all together
• you can make your own feeds and check what other people made (like a custom timeline, or topic-specific like “NBA”, “woodworking”, “retro gaming stuff”)
• has different modes: you can switch between videos, articles, podcasts depending on the feed

but also...

• can’t add your own RSS feeds (huge miss)
• some feeds break and show no posts even when they’re active (ok, it's still a beta)
• YouTube videos have ads (not into that—I support creators through patreon, affiliate links, whatever. not ads)
• feeds you create are public by default unless you manually change it
• not open source. built on open protocols, sure. but the app is locked up. (HUGE MISS)

all that said, I really believe: better feeds = better experience = better shot at the fediverse going mainstream.

anyone else tried it?

do you know anyone building an open source version of this? is that even realistic?

I’d love to hear what do you think :)