Flipboard is abandoning X for Mastodon

Flipboard is the latest company to end its presence on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a Medium post published Tuesday, the company said it would no longer be “actively monitoring or posting updates on X,” save for the occasional retweet. Instead, Flipboard will be refocusing its efforts on Mastodon and other open social platforms.

The reasons for Flipboard’s departure from X appear to be two-fold: X’s more lax moderation policies under Elon Musk’s leadership, which has led to a sharp spike in hate speech and misinformation; and Flipboard’s goal of working with federated social media services. Over the past several months, Flipboard has joined a growing list of companies, including Mozilla, Tumblr, and Medium, that are using the ActivityPub protocol to integrate with federated platforms.

“As widely reported, Twitter/X’s rollback of moderation policies has led to a rise in harmful rhetoric and hate speech and its platform decisions have advanced false narratives and disinformation. These changes run contrary to our values and so we’ve decided to invest in other, healthier environments,” Flipboard wrote in a message posted to Medium. 

Flipboard and X’s ties began to fray in April, when X shut off its free API, breaking the sharing function that Flipboard used to publish content. Instead, X has urged companies to join its paid API tier — for which an Enterprise plan was reported by Platformer to cost as much as $42,000 a month.

The company also launched its own podcast about the open social web, Dot Social, which will be hosted by Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. The first episode, published today, features Techdirt founder Mike Masnick.