• scsi
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    5 months ago

    This is appears to be dark pattern marketing at play; they run a Mastodon instance which intercepts all links to the federated content and pushes you towards their for-profit site; it was actually not doing this earlier, when I visited a few links I actually got real mastodon content pages inconsistently.

    Generally, if you visit anything like https://flipboard.social/@AlaskaBeacon@flipboard.com it redirects you to to flipboard.com/@AlaskaBeacon which is entirely their for-profit presence. But then it doesn’t a few tries later after testing more - I watched within a minute the Texas BBQ one allow me to see the profile on flipboard.social, I reloaded and was suddenly redirected to their flipboard.com/TexasBBQ site.

    It seems you might be able to load them into your own mastodon instance manually and it will work (I do see a profile page with legacy posts which hadn’t federated yet, so “no posts” at this early of a test). Something like https://myserver.social/@AlaskaBeacon@flipboard.com will presumably work; I suspect though that all posts will be stubs that drive you towards flipboard.com to read the actual content, rather than a direct source (time will tell).

    edit: s/is/appears to be/ to give benefit of the doubt