Flipboard is abandoning X for Mastodon

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 512 points – Flipboard is ditching X
theverge.com

Flipboard is abandoning X for Mastodon::The company cited a spike in hate speech and misinformation on the platform formerly known as Twitter, as well a desire to work with a federated network of social platforms.

18

The Flipboard team have top quality content on Mastodon already. It's worth following.

“Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company”

Cool that they’re avoiding Musk, but that seems more than a bit redundant.

How exactly is that redundant? Seems to me to be another service that collates and curates content out of the sea of the internet, and helps people find more targeted content.

An account on a news aggregator/social network for a separate news aggregator seems redundant. I realize that they’re trying to poach users, but on its face it still looks redundant.

Never heard of Flipboard 🤔

Ow it's actually quite big. Flipboard has over 145 million monthly active users

I suspect many of them have never heard of it, either. It was default software on some bloatware device I had, either a Samsung phone or tablet or a Lenovo laptop, maybe. I expect plenty of people just accepted that it was there in front of their face and must just be "the news on the Internet".

Can confirm it as bloatware on Samsung Galaxy phones (older ones; I think they stopped adding it recently)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The reasons for Flipboard’s departure from X appear to be two-fold: X’s more lax moderation policies under Elon Musk’s leadership, which has led to a sharp spike in hate speech and misinformation; and Flipboard’s goal of working with federated social media services.

Over the past several months, Flipboard has joined a growing list of companies, including Mozilla, Tumblr, and Medium, that are using the ActivityPub protocol to integrate with federated platforms.

“As widely reported, Twitter/X’s rollback of moderation policies has led to a rise in harmful rhetoric and hate speech and its platform decisions have advanced false narratives and disinformation.

These changes run contrary to our values and so we’ve decided to invest in other, healthier environments,” Flipboard wrote in a message posted to Medium.

Instead, X has urged companies to join its paid API tier — for which an Enterprise plan was reported by Platformer to cost as much as $42,000 a month.

The first episode, published today, features Techdirt founder Mike Masnick.

The original article contains 270 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 39%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Translated headline:

Flipboard is abandoning X for Mastodon / _Flipboard is not actually abandoning X._

Edit: Thinking more about it, I think the wise thing is to announce it like this so the head brat at Xitter doesn't revoke their account and hand it to someone else.

What ?

The actual headline:

Flipboard is abandoning X for Mastodon / The platform says it will hold on to its accounts and retweet from time to time, but it plans to focus on Mastodon and other social platforms instead.

My initial perception was focusing on the fact that that's not abandoning it. That's keeping one foot in the door, just in case.

Thinking more about it, I think the wise thing is to announce it like this so the head brat at Xitter doesn't revoke their account and hand it to someone else. Editing my statement above, too.