The Social Website — Update

This is a follow-up to my previous post, The Social Website. In that post, I challenged myself to turn this website into my “central social media hub”. Having thought about it a while, I suppose that can mean any combination of a few things:

1. Use the website to post content, replacing the act of posting to other social networks
2. Syndicating that content to other social networks — either manually, automatically or on schedule
3. Pulling in reactions from other social networks — for example, displaying on the website if a post got a reply or like on a social network where it was posted
4. The ability to interact with social network posts by reposting and sharing content from external feeds

So I’ve just been mucking about with plugins to see what’s out there.

I tried a WordPress plugin called Blog2Social: Social Media Auto Post & Scheduler, but it couldn’t even connect to my Mastodon account without the paid version. I’d honestly just manually post rather than pay a subscription fee. But for $29/year, it can post to up to 25 social networks. I need at least the $11/yr version just to connect to Mastodon, which is the only social network I’m currently active on. Blog2Social has a silly complicated pricing structure. But if it works, and you want to post to a bunch of social networks from WordPress, the cost isn’t bad. It’s good to know there are options for this, but I decided I’m happy to just post a link to Mastodon when I need to. Doing that from WordPress isn’t particularly helpful for me.

What I really wanted was to make it easy to share and interact with the content on this site. I installed the AddToAny plugin for this. That’s one of the two sharing plugins we recommend to clients at work. Seems like Oracle bought the other one and now is shutting it down. Nice. I like AddToAny because it replaces the Blocksy theme’s less complete sharing options. It looks good and works well. AddToAny supposedly makes money by selling data, but its unclear exactly what data they are collecting and who they are selling it to. I could find nothing about this anywhere on the website, even in the terms of service. That’s pretty shady. There is no paid option. It wasn’t enough to keep me from using it, in any case. This is a public website, and if someone is sharing, they’re most likely doing that publicly too. So whatever, take public data and sell it, I guess?

Despite integrating with a ridiculously large number of sharing targets, Instagram isn’t supported by AddToAny out of the box. I found some code on SO that adds it as an option. I tweaked it to reference a better Instagram logo I found and uploaded to WordPress, and changed the icon size to match the default AddToAny icons:

/*  AddToAny Instagram */
function addtoany_add_share_services( $services ) {
    $services['example_share_service'] = array(
        'name'        => 'Instagram',
        'icon_url'    => site_url('/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/instagram.gif'),
        'icon_width'  => 34,
        'icon_height' => 34,
        'href'        => 'https://www.instagram.com/',
    );
    return $services;
}
add_filter( 'A2A_SHARE_SAVE_services', 'addtoany_add_share_services', 10, 1 );

/*  AddToAny Instagram */
function addtoany_add_share_services( $services ) {
    $services['example_share_service'] = array(
        'name'        => 'Instagram',
        'icon_url'    => site_url('/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/instagram.gif'),
        'icon_width'  => 34,
        'icon_height' => 34,
        'href'        => 'https://www.instagram.com/',
    );
    return $services;
}
add_filter( 'A2A_SHARE_SAVE_services', 'addtoany_add_share_services', 10, 1 );

In the spirit of making this space more interactive, I enabled standard WordPress comments and registration. Because doing this creates a nearly instant spam honeypot, I installed Antispam Bee.

I also installed the IndieWeb plugin. This plugin wraps a bunch of other plugins that provide additional features. It’s a little unclear what, if anything, the core plugin does. But it collects a bunch of other plugins.

Webmention is like the standards-based implementation of WordPress pingbacks. I set up IndieAuth, which is a cool idea that is slowly gaining adoption. Syndication Links lets you reference where else you posted the same content or a reference to it. WebSub is a cool idea — basically web hooks for website notifications. I’ll be tinkering with this stuff. IndieBlocks seems to provide a set of questionably useful blocks. This one formats a repost, which is kind of cool:

At least for Mastodon, using their embed code looks a lot better:

Post by @[email protected]

View on Mastodon

Finally, I added this site to the IndieWeb Webring, which is now displayed in the footer with links to previous and next sites in the ring. These are fun to surf through.

I’m curious to see what I can do with cross-posting to Mastodon. Can I capture replies and likes and boosts from Mastodon in WordPress?

Late breaking update: Mark Waters posted a comment suggesting a couple additional plugins for Mastodon integration. Share on Mastodon is an easy way to auto-post to Mastodon from the WordPress editor. And Replies Importer for Mastodon closes the loop, importing replies to posts on Mastodon that link back to a page here into comments in WordPress.