246 - Building your own social network with the Friends plugin

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246 – Building your own social network with the Friends plugin

Interview with Alex Kirk and Nathan Wrigley

So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea!

If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all.

On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he’s built a social network plugin for WordPress.

It’s called Friends, and it does a lot more than just offering an alternative to Facebook et al.

At the start of the podcast we talk about where we’re both at with social networks. You can listen to hear Alex’s position, but for me, it’s something that I’m trying to walk back. I’m frequenting social media less and less and switching off notifications for all-the-things. It’s not that I don’t want to be there, it’s just that I want to be there less of the time and don’t want to be notified all of the time. This part of the podcast is about 20 minutes long, so for the WP Builds podcast, it’s quite a long introduction to the subject.

We then move onto the plugin itself and Alex explains what is does and how it does it.

It’s really interesting as it connects with other installs, but also serves as a base for curating a list of your own RSS feeds. This means that it does not have to have other people signing in and participating for it to be useful. Can you imagine Twitter / Facebook if nobody else was using the platform, it would be pointless. Not so for Friends, you can set it up and run it as a silo of the things that you care about consuming online.

The point is that it’s yours and you can do with it what you like, without the feeling that it’s sucking information about you out, to then push towards advertisers, or goodness knows what!

It’s a great episode, and I would certainly recommend having a listen and seeing if this is something that you could use.

As a complete aside…

I have started a Mastodon instance which you can find over at wpbuilds.social should you wish for a more federated, Twitter-like, experience!