A Twitter-like widget of fediverse posts in WordPress via RSS
At the time being people flee Twitter and open Mastodon accounts due to Elon Musk’s support of far-right users on Twitter which deteriorates the common user experience by far. Often people have a small timeline displaying their own tweets on their blogs that will loose its function if they abandon Twitter. This is usually done through a widget which loads some JavaScript from Twitter servers.
![A Twitter-like widget of fediverse posts in WordPress via RSS 1 A screenshot of my webpage showing the widget of the plugin “Easy Twitter Feeds” in action (12/25/2022)](https://ingram-braun.net/erga/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/twitter-widget_ingram-braun.net_2022-12-25_00-16-26_876693-1024x555.jpg)
As far as I know there isn’t such a plugin for Fediverse clients like Mastodon or Friendica (which I use). But those provide RSS feeds for specific accounts. From a technically point of view these feeds are easy to embed in your wordpress via a widget. You even don’t need a plugin for that. But as the devil is in the details there rises a big issue. This widget usually display the title of the feed item. But social ´media posts don’t have in most cases. The in-build RSS widget simply prints a standard text (“feed item”). Of course this is absolutely pointless. I have played around with some plugins and ended up with the following solution:
![A Twitter-like widget of fediverse posts in WordPress via RSS 2 Available blocks of the Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite plugin.](https://ingram-braun.net/erga/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/feedzy-settings_ingram-braun.net_2022-12-25_12-12-21_497943-1024x555.jpg)
I took the plugin Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite which allows for some advanced styling of the feed items. In the frontend’s widget menu it provides two blocks: one with a widget icon and one with a RSS icon. Take the first one and put it in your sidebar. You have the option to show a title and/or a description with a certain amount of characters. The are two differences between title and decription:
- The title ist taken from the first line of a post if there is none in the source. The description is taken from the entire post.
- The title is linked to the original post while the description is not.
I disabled the description by setting the character number to zero. For the title I choose a length of 80 characters. This is not perfect but leads to reasonable results. If your web server delivers a Conten-Security-Policy header (and it should!) you have to allow for your fediverse domain as image source otherwise images get blocked.
![A Twitter-like widget of fediverse posts in WordPress via RSS 3 Feedzy widget displays Ingram Braun's Friendica feed in sidebar.](https://ingram-braun.net/erga/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/feedzy-sidebar_ingram-braun.net_2022-12-25_12-26-16_179214-1024x555.jpg)
There is an additional benefit for users in the European Union which have to obey the GDPR: there is no traffic to servers in the US anymore.