With this latest deal, Flipboard looks to build a news ecosystem beyond X
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.
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.
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