Your own WordPress at the center of your online activity.

Don’t depend on external services.

It’s time for the return of the personal blog. Your blog.

With WordPress and the Friends Plugin you can stay connected to your friends’ (online) activity, just by using your own blog.

Install the Friends plugin on your WordPress

What is the Friends Plugin?

A social network between WordPresses. Privacy focused, by itself a self-hosted RSS++ reader with notifications. Open Source. Github

What does the plugin allow me to do?

Follow your friends across platforms

  • Select the feeds you want to subscribe to
  • View them all in the frontend

Categorize by post format. Get e-mail notifications of new posts. Use rules to filter them. Send them to your e-reader. Emoji react to posts. Collect and share them using Post Collections.

Learn more in Consume the Web Your Way.

Make private posts accessible to just your blog friends

When you have established a friend connection to your friend’s blog, you can view their private posts. See this demo video:

Watch how Friendship Requests and private posts work

Control visibility for friends on a per-block basis. Supports IndieAuth, doesn’t interfere with other IndieWeb projects such as webmentions.

Blog to blog messaging

A quick way to send a message to your friend, all contact data you need is their blog.

  • Sending a message
  • Receiving a message

Messages with Gutenberg block support. Get notified of new messages via e-mail.

See the Features page for more.

Philiosophy & Vision

By adding social glue to your own blog (i.e. connecting it to your friends’ blogs), it can be the place where you can see what they are up to–without somebody tracking each of your views or interactions.

Because of a friend connection you can then (unlike with regular blogs) post privately, so that you can decide for each post whether only your friends can see your posts.

Read more about the vision

Sustainability

This project is a hobby, open source project. It is for a better web, not to make money. It is to scratch a personal itch, making it available to the world. It is user friendly, because it is meant to be used. It exposes technical edges because as of now it is a solution to a problem that not many people yet care about.

For our roadmap and future ideas check the open issues on the Github repository.