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

. . . so how does it work on, say, lemmy?

Neat, I forgot all about Flipboard. Glad to see someone pushing for more local news reporting, giant corporate takeovers have really hurt independent reporting on all levels but especially at the local level.