People seem to appreciate the many editorial desks that @Flipboard launched on its own Mastodon instance (kudos to the editorial team!). The lessons the team learned likely played a big role in the ActivityPub news.
The problem with traditional social with Flipboard IMO was that you had to avoid spamming people from this many channel. Through AP, content creators/curators can do it themselves while better thing in Flipboard into their workflow.
https://medium.com/@mmccue/flipboard-begins-to-federate-4a80d6bdc209