Friends

The Friends plugin allows you to follow content from other WordPress sites, and interact with them on your own site. You can follow friends and others via RSS. If you also have the ActivityPub plugin installed, you can follow people on Mastodon and other ActivityPub-compatible social networks.

Since version 2.6.0, no users will be created for subscriptions.

Combine this plugin with the ActivityPub plugin to make your own WordPress your own Mastodon instance. Use the Enable Mastodon Apps to use mobile and desktop Mastodon apps with your own site.

The Friends Plugin also has a “friend request” function which allows blogs to become friends with each other. This then allows private publishing on your blog while each of their friends has their own blog but will be able to see your privately published posts.

There are many small aspects that make it powerful self-hosted social reader:

You can…
– Have multiple feeds per person, so you can subscribe to their blog(s) and social media account(s).
– Categorize incoming content with Post Formats and view all posts of a certain format across your friends.
– Define rules to filter incoming content (sometimes you’re not interested in everything your friends do).
– Turn your favorite blog into your personal newsletter by receiving full-post notification e-mails
– Use feed rules to filter out content you are not interested in.
– Receive ePubs of your friends’ posts to your eReader (via another plugin).
– Collect posts (from your feeds or around the web) in a collection for later reference (via another plugin).

Philosophy

The Friends Plugin was built to make use of what WordPress provides:

• You use the WordPress infrastructure (Gutenberg or Classic Editor, what you prefer) to create your posts.
• If a post is private, only logged-in friends can see it. They can only log in through their own Friends plugin on their blog.
• Therefore, your friend is just a user on your WordPress blog, their posts are theirs, you can delete them to unfriend them.
• No extra tables: The Friends plugin just uses a post type, options and some taxonomies to store its data. When you delete the plugin, your WordPress will be slim like before.

In future, I could see mobile apps instead of talking to a third party, to talk to your own blog. It will have your friends’ posts already fetched. Maybe the apps will be specialized, like Twitter or Instagram, where you’d only interact with and create posts in the specific post format.

The logo was created by Ramon Dodd, @ramonopoly. Thank you!

Documentation for the plugin can be found on the GitHub project Wiki.

Development of this plugin is done on GitHub. Pull requests welcome. Please see issues reported there before going to the plugin forum.