Notices by Alex Kirk (alex@alex.kirk.at)

It has been baking for much longer than I wanted, but today I released the next major version of my Friends Plugin for WordPress.

The biggest change is a deviation from the original idea: Friendships between WordPresses have been removed. With ActivityPub (when the respective ActivityPub plugin is installed, too) we have a communication protocol that is supported by many more platforms than just other WordPresses that also happen to have installed the Friends plugin.

Removing friendship functionality reduces a lot of complexity in the plugin that changed some fundamentals of WordPress. The friendship functionality had been deactivated for a while behind a checkbox.

This means that the Friends plugin now focusses on functionality of subscribing to feeds (be it RSS, Atom or ActivityPub) and integrating outward communication via ActivityPub (direct messages, replies).

To make the consuming more attractive, I have worked on providing more integrated themes. I had added the ability to contribute themes already some time ago, thanks for the FediPress theme contribution! Being more a developer than a designer, my default Friends theme has been deemed more functional than pretty (from what I heard).

So, the new themes are:

A Block Theme, which allows you to modify the Friends page using the Site Editor and gives it the design of your own site’s theme.

A Google Reader Theme makes it look like Google Reader. This comes with keyboard shortcuts and the accordion-like behavior of the posts.

I had already done a prototype of a Mastodon Theme and have now added a functional one that is shipped by default.

All the themes now support light and dark mode (which makes the Mastodon theme look a bit unusual in light mode).

I hope that the screenshots above highlight the versatility of the plugin and how much the visual appearance can shape the perception.

A big reason for the 4.0 version number was the number of migrations of internal data structures towards more taxonomies (the Friends plugin did not and does not use custom tables). This removes the last bits of supporting WordPress users as friend users and adds proper term relationships between friends and subscriptions. This also allowed to add support for folders.

But it makes a transition from an earlier version potentially a bit tricky. With this amount of changes and migrations, I opted to make it easier to discover what’s new and what is already migrated. I hope that all migrations go smoothly but if they don’t, this gives you insight into where things might be stuck.

The amount of necessary fundamental changes and migrations made this release somewhat risky and was a reason for the long time since the last release. I am hoping that with these changes now shipped, I can provide more frequent updates again!

Oh, I also shipped a new version of the Enable Mastodon Apps plugin (1.5.0) which makes use of some of the taxonomy changes in Friends that now allow to distinguish between mentions and direct messages, and there should be a speed-up in many endpoints, especially the notifications endpoint.

Enjoy this new release, which I hope will make it easier and more feasible to use Your WordPress as Your Personal Mastodon Instance.

I’ll speak about Telex and how to use Playground in your AI workflow at today’s WordPress Vienna meetup!

Folien meiner #wcvie Präsentation: https://alex.kirk.at/wcvie-2025

In case you noticed that the Friends Plugin was pulled from the WordPress.org plugin directory, it’s back again. Thanks for all the messages!

Unser WordCamp Deutschland 2023 Vortrag ist nun auf WordPress.tv verfügbar: Friends with ActivityPub – deine nachhaltige Identität im Web @pfefferle #wcde2023