WordPress as a Refuge from Algorithms

In a previous post, I have written about how you can use WordPress as your own Mastodon instance with the three plugins ActivityPub, Friends, and Enable Mastodon Apps.

The Friends plugin also provides an RSS/Atom feed parser (and can be extended with more of them) so you that you can automatically receive content from many sources. You can also save posts from around the web using the Post Collection plugin, which also provides a “retrieve full content” for excerpt-only RSS feeds. To read what you’ve saved without distractions, you can then send this to your e-reader.

Because this runs on your WordPress, it means that you don’t have to play by the rules set by others (= the social media platform that hosts you). I am not talking about illegal content or anything similar, but rather avoiding exposure to unsolicited content that is intended solely to keep you addicted to the platform.

Another aspect for which I believe WordPress is excellent is maintaining private blogs for content that you don’t want to put on the public web, such as photos of your children. Or a family wiki, a Wikipedia for your family members. All these are things that I prefer not to expose to algorithms like those used by social media platforms.

Digital Consumption Pyramid, modeled after the Food Pyramid

For our digital consumption, I propose we model this after the food pyramid. Sweets (= the addictive stuff) is on the top, it is ok to consume some, but it should not dominate. Below that, we’d have video games, then time on productive systems without algorithms like your own WordPress, or messaging with your friends. I believe the base should consist of research and reading for gaining knowledge.

This is just my own suggestion that I may need to adjust over time. However, I think it illustrates the point that you should be conscious of your own digital and screen time: Your WordPress can be a place for your own consumption needs, away from algorithms that try to manipulate you.

Yes, it’s harder to set up a WordPress than just creating a social media account. I believe that with Playground and blueprints this will become easier soon. But this little bit of extra work gives you the freedom to not be constantly monitored in order to manipulate you with new content to stay on the platform. Or have your data be used for training AI.

I’ll be talking about the above in more detail this weekend in German at WordCamp Vienna (April 25, 2025 at 10am), and in English at WordCamp Europe (June 7, 2025 at 2pm) in Basel, Switzerland. See you there!

WordPress as a Self-Hosting Platform

Leaving the current drama around WordPress.org aside for now, I believe that there is a use case for WordPress that is heavily underutilized: Using WordPress as a platform for self-hosting.

When people think WordPress, they think publishing platform. And, of course, that’s its nature. It was built for expressing yourself publicly on the internet. But as we have seen over the years, it is also a pretty good framework on which—through its plugin system—almost anything can be built on top of it.

This is especially interesting considering that you can get WordPress hosting easily and for cheap. Even NAS systems like Synology or QNAP support installing WordPress on them.

There are so many services on the internet that have self-hosting options. An interesting website about this is selfh.st. It’s a compilation of different apps, amongst others:

A downside of this plethora of self-hosting apps is that they each have their unique software stack and requirements. While this complexity can be alleviated with virtualization solutions like Docker, it means that with every additional app, the hardware requirements for your host go up.

When using WordPress as a basis for self-hosting, the software requirements for all plugins are about the same, namely PHP and MySQL. This means as soon as you have WordPress hosting, you have your basis for self-hosting, without having to go through software requirements.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, WordPress out of the box is open and public. Thus, if you want to self-host just for yourself (and friends and family, i.e. logged-in users), the first step needs to be to install a “Private WordPress” plugin.

Then, also, there are not yet many plugins that provide a self-host experience. While I am only doing this on the side (for now), I am working on changing this by building more of these plugins.

I recently realized that this was a big part of what I am trying to do with my Friends plugin. While it even has a public component (you might reblog what you read in it), I framed it as the center of your online activity.

From a self-host perspective, it’s a combined RSS Reader with a publishing platform that has ActivityPub support (thus making it a full Mastodon instance), e-mail and keyword notifications, post format support, etc.

Additionally, its independence from major third-party social networks is equivalent to the goals of self-hosting. It can’t be shutdown on you because the service was bought or turned out to be not profitable enough. Also, you can choose where to host it.

So what does WordPress offer for self-hosting yet? Maybe let’s just revisit what I build and am using myself. These are all WordPress plugins:

For Bookmarking, I also have ported my old project thinkery.me to a Thinkery WordPress plugin, hopefully I’ll have time to give it the finishing touches.

I would love to store my family’s recipies in such a WordPress environment, too.

While self-hosting photo management also sounds tempting, I actually think that a private family blog is a superior alternative. We’re drowning in photos and videos, but being able to keep them along with a title and a story is much better than the endless streams in Google Photos and the like.

I don’t know whether WordPress will ever offer as large a selection of self-hosted apps as WordPress plugins. But I do think that it’s a path worth following. It might not be a nerd’s favorite choice, but easy hosting and administration could allow WordPress to democratize self-hosting next.