What is “TDF” and why is it following me?
A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity. – Dalai Lama
Today, Flipboard announced the ability for our users to follow anyone in the fediverse. As a company, we are strong supporters of decentralized social media and in particular the role that Activity Pub plays in this space.
Prior to this launch, we created an account called tdf (for the daily fediverse) and followed many users very quickly prior to creating a profile or doing normal user behavior things for an account. This (rightfully) upset many in the fediverse as it was implied this was some sort of bot account out to take nefarious actions on users personal posts. There was also confusion on the role of this account as compared to the equivalent Mastodon account
This account was just an early account supporting the features of today's announcement. It's not a bot. It's me. Greg. I did not want to clutter my personal account so I created a new one where my goal was to interact with as many people in the active fediverse as possible so I could learn and help the rest of our Flipboard users find interesting people to follow and interact with in the fediverse. For example, check out our blog post on how to discover people to follow. I've since updated the profile with more details, but wanted to share in a blog post also for those still concerned.
We want Flipboard users to be part of the fediverse
When I follow you, you will see a follow request like any other good natured fediverse account. When I post (and I won't more than a few times a day) and you follow me, hopefully you will see my posts. And we can reply to each other. That's it. A normal account. I check it every day. I've already received over 1000 follows from just a few days of posting independent of the people I followed. This tells me there is some sort of value in what we are doing and as I continue to utilize this account, I hope we can further bring that kind of value to the rest of the fediverse and Flipboard. The same is true for the flipboard.social version of this account.
Transparency
Transparency is important to me and Flipboard, so I will attempt to address many of the reasonable questions people had regarding this account:
1) Why did you follow so many people?
I followed many to find interesting people in the fediverse, to interact, reply, see their posts in this new feature set, and make sure our work did the right things before launching. I could have done this more slowly or more intentionally by reviewing the posts of everyone first. Next time I will.
2) How did you find these people and follow them so fast?
I looked at our flipboard.social instance to find recent users it knew about who had many followers and had posted recently. I then wrote a script that gave my account permission to invoke an API and requested to follow those accounts.
3) Why not just setup a relay instead?
My goal is to post a few times and interact with people. A relay is intended to suck content in for others to discover when there is a public timeline. Flipboard does not offer a public timeline for discovery. Down the road, if we support a direct follow and public timeline, this would work and is something we are looking into per request from our users.
4) What are you doing with all the data (users and posts) that you receive from the fediverse?
We utilize the data only in the product as per the blog post. That data never leaves our premises and is removed as soon as it is no longer utilized and needed. We (and I, personally) care greatly about privacy and security at Flipboard.
5) How is this account different from the same account on flipboard.social?
Both accounts are the same behavior, but meant for different systems. On flipboard.com, I use our actual product to interact with everyone. On flipboard.social, I use a variety of Mastodon supporting apps.
6) Was this worth it?
Absolutely! One of the hardest things about being a good citizen in the fediverse is learning what everyone thinks it means to be a good citizen in the fediverse. And the only way to can learn is by interacting with the fediverse. I've had a number of bugs reported to me including ones really really important (like private posts being replied to publicly ... which we fixed immediately) and more esoteric ones like replies seen on the latest Mastodon instances showing a translate option when the reply was in English and the user the reply went to had English as their language.
I want to thank everyone in the fediverse who has helped this be a positive experience and look forward to continued interactions. Reach out to me at tdf or via Greg with questions any time.