Explore: Friends plugin integration for social fitness feed

[apermo]

Context

Alex Kirk's Friends plugin adds a social layer to WordPress — follow other sites, see a timeline of their posts, react, and comment. Combined with ActivityPub, it creates a decentralized social network.

For Body Refactoring, this means: a fitness feed showing your friends' workouts, achievements, and progress.

What Friends Plugin Provides

• Follow/unfollow other Body Refactoring users (or any ActivityPub actor)
• Timeline/feed of incoming posts from followed users
• Reactions and comments on posts
• Friend requests and access control

Integration Ideas

Social Feed in the App

• Embed or link to the Friends timeline from within Body Refactoring
• Show a "Community" tab with friends' recent workouts
• Could be as simple as an iframe or a dedicated page template

Rich Rendering of Workout Posts

• When a followed user publishes a br_workout post, render it as a workout card (not just text)
• Show exercise names, completion status, streak info
• Display achievements with badges

Mutual Motivation

• "Cheers" / reactions on completed workouts
• Streak comparisons (friendly, not competitive)
• Weekly summaries: "3 of your friends trained this week"

Questions for Alex

• Can the Friends plugin render custom post types with specialized templates?
• Is there a hook/filter to customize how incoming br_workout posts appear in the timeline?
• How does Friends handle posts with structured metadata — does it pass through AP object extensions?
• Would a "Friends Feed" widget/shortcode work, or is the full Friends page the expected UX?
• How to handle the case where a friend uses Body Refactoring but another uses a different fitness app that also speaks ActivityPub?

Privacy

• Following is opt-in
• Users control what they share (see CPT issue for granularity)
• No central server sees the data — each user's WordPress is the source of truth