Category:

Something which I was hoping would pick up steam faster is the Fediverse. In short, people self-hosting their own websites like this one, yet connect them together. Then we’d all own our own data and could leave places like Facebook. Instead of going to Facebook to see what unrealistic, positive only posts there are 😘, you can see them from your own blog. I suppose this approach isn’t as popular as it should be due to the barrier to entry. You must have your own website and it must support some sort of way to connect your site to others.

Many websites with this technology use different protocols to communicate with each other. If you ever hear ActivityPub or OStatus for example, these are the names of the protocols. However, it might not have been necessary to create these because for a lot longer we’ve had RSS.

WordPress thankfully still comes with RSS feeds built in. Using RSS and other built-in WordPress features, Alex Kirk has created Friends, a WordPress plugin to connect WordPress sites together.

I love it, a lot.

You can use it as an RSS feed reader and subscribe to any RSS feed. But also, you can send others friend requests and join each other’s sites. From there you can do things like, point your readers to a page where they can see your friend’s posts and react to posts. I’m still learning what all you can do.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, friend me!



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Billy Wilcosky