An effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is now in the hands of the social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, a service that created mirrored accounts of top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even yours truly), has transferred its collection of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard, the companies announced Thursday.
Press.coop was founded a year ago by a fediverse company, Hello.coop, headed by Dick Hardt. Like many, he wanted there to be more access to news in the fediverse, particularly the X rival Mastodon, where many top publishers had yet to set up shop as they had on Twitter/X. To address this need, Press.coop mirrored the publishers’ Twitter/X accounts, bringing their tweets to the broader open social web.
However, when Twitter changed its API rules and upped its pricing, that access was cut off. Press.coop then moved to mirror publishers’ RSS feeds instead.
Though these mirrored accounts were just bots that posted the publishers’ news to the fediverse as it hit their news feeds, many gained a following. The NPR account, for example, gained 10,000 press.coop followers. Others saw smaller followings.
While the movement of the accounts to Flipboard isn’t an official partnership or acquisition, in business terms, it serves the needs of news readers, publishers, and Flipboard alike, while freeing up Hardt to work on other things.
Flipboard has been more actively moving to become a federated app in recent months. After announcing its plans to integrate with the fediverse and ActivityPub — the protocol powering Mastodon and other federated apps — Flipboard 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 web and vice versa. Its creator-built news magazines, meanwhile, are now offered to users on the fediverse, expanding their reach.
Flipboard also brought its own editorial efforts to Mastodon with its 2023 launch of news “desks” designed for tracking stories in areas like tech, culture, science, and more, which weren’t automated accounts. These, too, now post regularly on Mastodon from Flipboard’s own Mastodon server, Flipboard.social.
The addition of the press.coop accounts expands on that earlier effort. By using these federated Flipboard accounts, publishers on Flipboard’s app will be able to see engagement in their Flipboard notifications. Plus, their existing Flipboard followers will be merged with the followers from the press.coop accounts, growing their reach.
Press.coop itself is shutting down Thursday, Hardt announced on the service’s website.
“We noticed that Flipboard has been providing much of the same content to the fediverse, so we’ve decided to partner with them and migrate all press.coop accounts to the correlated flipboard.com publisher account or to a flipboard.social account for those that are not on Flipboard already,” the site notes. The migration should complete by the end of the month.
