Friends

By Alex Kirk

Community & Social / User-Generated Content

Friends Review - In-Depth Analysis

Friends is a self-hosted social reader for WordPress that allows you to follow people via RSS and ActivityPub. It features multiple themes and an extensible plugin ecosystem.

Performance Overview

WPS Score

0/10

User Rating

5/5 (based on 7+ reviews)

Active Installations

1,000+

Update Frequency

No Rating It is calculated using the weighted average of same category plugins.

Security Score

1 / 10 (Very Low Risk) It is calculated using the weighted average of all versions.

What It Does

The Friends plugin turns your WordPress into a self-hosted social reader. Follow people via RSS and ActivityPub and read their posts through one of several built-in themes with dark mode support.

Combine this plugin with the ActivityPub plugin to participate in the Fediverse from your own site. Use the Enable Mastodon Apps plugin to use mobile and desktop Mastodon apps with your WordPress.

The plugin is designed to be extensible: other plugins can add parsers for new feed sources, new themes, and new functionality like saving posts to a collection or sending them to an eReader.

You can choose from multiple themes, organize your subscriptions into folders, and have multiple feeds per person. Categorize incoming content with Post Formats and view all posts of a certain format across your feeds. Define rules to filter incoming content and get full-post email notifications from your favorite blogs.

Save posts to a collection for later reference and send posts to your eReader. Subscribe to any site with one click using the Friends browser extension.

The Friends Plugin was built to make use of what WordPress provides. You use the WordPress infrastructure to create your posts. Followed people are stored as taxonomy terms, and their posts are cached as a custom post type.