Flipboard has been a popular news reader for years, grabbing data from news sites and social media feeds into a single “social magazine.” The service is now going all in with Mastodon, the rapidly-growing open-source social media service.

Flipboard has offered integration with Twitter for years, allowing you to see articles or text posts shared by people you follow in the app’s main feed — an especially helpful feature for people interested in specific people or topics, rather than everything from a given news source. However, with Twitter cutting off many third-party services from its API, and Mastodon becoming a Twitter replacement for many people, Flipboard is updating its apps to work equally well with Mastodon.

Flipboard is now testing Mastodon support in its iPhone and iPad apps, coming soon to the Android app. The company said in a blog post, “Once you have a Mastodon account you can connect it to your Flipboard to flip through and interact with your Mastodon timelines in beautiful Flipboard fashion. You can reply, favorite, boost and post directly to Mastodon. You can also flip interesting posts you discover on Mastodon into your Magazines for other Flipboarders to enjoy.”

Flipboard isn’t stopping there, though. The company has also set up its own Mastodon server at flipboard.social, which it intends as a “fast, reliable and welcoming home for Flipboard users to easily get started in the Fediverse.” People with accounts on flipboard.social can follow and interact with people on other Mastodon servers (or compatible servers), and vice-versa, thanks to Mastodon’s decentralized nature and ActivityPub protocol.

It’s great to see more apps and companies switch gears and start supporting open-source and decentralized social media. Tumblr and Flickr are investigating interoperability with Mastodon, Mozilla is starting up its own server, and the popular social media account manager Buffer recently added Mastodon support. We’ve also seen the developers of a few popular Twitter apps switch over to developing Mastodon apps, like the former Tweetbot developers starting up Ivory.

RELATED: Mastodon Is Taking Off: Why It’s My Favorite Social Media Network

Flipboard is available for iPhone/iPad, Android, and Windows, but only the iPhone/iPad version has Mastodon integration right now.

Source: Flipboard