[ad_1]
The effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as fediverse, is now in the hands of social magazine app Flipboard. press.cobFlipboard, a service that has created mirror accounts for major news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN and even your real account), is moving its suite of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard, the companies announced Thursday.
Press.coop was founded a year ago by a federal company, Hello.coop, headed by Dick Hardt. Like many, he wanted there to be more access to news around the world, especially Competitor X Mastodonwhere many major publishers didn’t have to set up shop like they did on Twitter/X. To meet this need, Press.coop mimicked publishers’ Twitter/X accounts, bringing their tweets to the wider, open social web.
However, when Twitter changed its API rules and raised its prices, this access was cut off. Press.coop then moved to publishers’ RSS feeds instead.
Although these identical accounts were simply bots that posted news from federal publishers as soon as it reached their news feeds, many of them gained followers. For example, NPR’s account gained 10,000 followers on press.coop. Others saw a smaller following.
Although moving accounts to Flipboard is not a formal partnership or acquisition, from a business standpoint, it serves the needs of news readers, publishers and Flipboard alike, while freeing up Hardt to work on other things.
Flipboard has been moving more actively to become a unified app in recent months. After announcing its plans to integrate with fediverse and ActivityPub — the protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated apps — Flipboard has made it possible for its users to follow Mastodon accounts from within its app, as well as follow and interact with others on the open social network. vice versa. Meanwhile, news magazines created by creators are now being offered to users around the world, expanding their reach.
Flipboard has also brought its own editorial efforts to Mastodon with its 2023 launch of news “desks” designed to track stories in areas such as Technology, culture, sciencesAnd more, which were not automatic calculations. These are now also published regularly on Mastodon from Flipboard’s Mastodon server, Flipboard.social.
The addition of press.coop accounts expands on this previous effort. With unified Flipboard accounts, publishers on the Flipboard app will be able to see engagement in their Flipboard notifications. Additionally, their existing followers on Flipboard will be merged with followers from press.coop accounts, increasing their reach.
Press.coop itself will be closed on Thursday, Hardt Announce On the service’s website.
“We noticed that Flipboard was providing a lot of the same content to the federation, so we decided to partner with them and migrate all press.coop accounts to a linked publisher account on flipboard.com or to a flipboard.social account for those that aren’t on Flipboard already,” he points out. The migration process should be completed by the end of the month.
[ad_2]