This comment is from my own blog! I’m using the plugin as the main driver of federation, with the other main IndieWeb plugins (webmention, syndication links, post kinds, etc) to fill in the gaps to bring back comments from elsewhere, incl. Mastodon, and to reply to posts/toots. The Friends plugin acts as a feed function and a way to add people, though it’s not perfect and it doesn’t work for discovery of new content.

With all of these, I’ve been able to implement lightweight federation, though there is room for improvement.

Yes, sweet! Real posts will include a link and an except and anything else will use the standard post format. Now I just need to make this work well in different use cases, like when I use an external Micropub app that can’t set the Post Format, so the published post defaults to Standard. And get rid of the annoying extra line when there are no .

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that this place was transforming a bit, to become more of hub for contents of all types. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to do things. I’ve been experimenting with adding a Reply button to the Friends plugin and I’ve been experimenting with modifying the specific content posted to social networks from this blog, trying to remove links back to the blog for simple statuses (they seem spammy) while maintaining it for regular posts like this one. The Reply button trial has worked but I ran into some roadblocks with modifying the post content.

I’m giving it another try with this very post. Let’s see if I’ve broken the plugin. If not, I’ll try to expand on my experiment by optionizing the concept.

A few observations regarding the plugin:

1) It’d be nice if certain posts could be prevented from being widely distributed. For example, a reply distributed to another blog or Twitter doesn’t make sense to post to Mastodon/Fediverse since the quoted source itself isn’t included.

2) It needs a few more options for how posts are formatted. I don’t think it makes sense to include a link back to the source on simple statuses, though it does make sense for articles.

3) Now that the Friends plugin can send a follow request to an added subscription, it’d be great to have a list of follows as well.