The rise of decentralized social networks and the Fediverse has been a game-changer for anyone looking to take control of their digital social experience. On the an episode of Open Web Converstions, host Matthias Pfefferle sat down with Alex Kirk—creator of the Friends plugin—to explore how WordPress can play a key role in this movement.
Taking Back Your Social Feed
If you’re tired of handing over your data and experience to big, centralized social networks, the Friends plugin might be your answer. Alex Kirk was inspired by the desire to recreate the “friends and family feed” idea from platforms like Facebook—but without the baggage of a corporation controlling your data. Instead, Friends allows you to turn your WordPress site into your own private social feed, connecting with others on your terms.
Private, Decentralized Sharing
One of the killer features of Friends is its ability to handle not only public posts, but also private sharing—something traditional WordPress setups weren’t designed for. Through authenticated RSS feeds, Friends lets you share posts privately with select friends, creating a network of trusted sites. “If I publish something privately, all my friends would receive those private posts, and that was the whole point of it,” Alex explains.
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Beyond WordPress: Following the Whole Web
But the Friends plugin isn’t just about WordPress-to-WordPress communication. Early on, Alex realized most of his friends—and likely yours, too—aren’t running their own WordPress sites. So he built functionality to follow any RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, or even scraped feeds from social platforms, allowing your WordPress-powered personal feed reader to collect content from blogs, news sites, and beyond.
Bridging the Fediverse
With the explosion of ActivityPub and platforms like Mastodon, Friends has kept evolving. By integrating with the ActivityPub protocol, anyone running WordPress with Friends can now interact with millions of users on federated platforms. Even better: thanks to API compatibility, you can use popular Mastodon apps to browse your personal WordPress-powered feed, making it even easier to blend with the wider decentralized social web.
Use Cases: From Power Feeds to Pocket Replacements
Alex isn’t just theorizing—he’s living this out, using Friends as an ultra-customizable reading app (think Pocket, but for every feed you care about), and even exporting collections to his e-reader for offline reading. Friends has become not just a publishing tool, but a private, customizable social hub for the open web.
Ready to Reclaim Your Feed?
The Friends plugin shows just how flexible WordPress can be. Want to run your own decentralized social network? Or just curate and control the content you see? Friends bridges worlds—RSS, ActivityPub, private posts, even browser extensions and feed scraping. All running on your own turf.
You can grab the Friends plugin directly from the WordPress.org plugin directory and check out Alex’s thoughts and guides at his personal blog.
It’s time to bring social back home.
