Bigfoot Open Wall

Bigfoot Open Wall brings public posts from Mastodon, Pixelfed and other RSS/Atom feeds together in one responsive, chronological social wall for WordPress.

Feeds are fetched server-side and cached locally using WordPress transients. Regular page views therefore use cached feed data instead of contacting every configured source again on each visit.

No embeds. No bundled analytics. No third-party JavaScript. No scraping.

Bigfoot Open Wall is designed for site owners who publish or follow content across the open social web but still want their own website to remain the central place where visitors can find that activity.

Features include:

• Mastodon RSS support
• Pixelfed Atom support
• Additional RSS/Atom feeds with custom display names
• Per-feed diagnostics for reachability, format, item count and media detection
• Manual feed validation from the WordPress admin
• Responsive masonry-style layout
• Centered source filter bar
• Full post text without automatic truncation
• Image and multi-image support when supplied by the source feed
• Source-aware client-side Load more pagination
• Native dynamic Gutenberg block
• Shortcode support
• Original-item links
• WordPress transient caching
• Configurable wall width, cache duration, initial post count and batch size
• Bundled German interface translation
• No bundled analytics or tracking
• No third-party JavaScript dependencies

The Gutenberg block uses the feeds configured globally under Settings > Bigfoot Open Wall. It can override the initial number of visible posts and can show or hide the source filters. The frontend uses the same PHP rendering and cache logic as the shortcode.

Generic RSS and Atom feeds vary in how they expose media. Text, dates and links are generally portable; image support depends on the source feed.

Instagram is not included and is not a near-term roadmap priority. Scraping is intentionally not used. Any future proprietary-platform connector would require a suitable official API and a maintainable privacy-conscious implementation.

External services

Bigfoot Open Wall only contacts feed URLs that a site administrator explicitly configures.

Configured RSS and Atom feeds are fetched server-side through WordPress. When a feed is refreshed or explicitly checked with Feed diagnostics, the remote feed provider receives a request from the web server. Depending on normal web-server behavior, this can include information such as the server IP address, request headers and the requested feed URL.

Normalized feed data is cached locally using WordPress transients. By default, cached feed data is kept for 30 minutes, so regular page views do not request the configured feed sources again on every visit.

Media files are not mirrored locally by Bigfoot Open Wall. Images are loaded from the media URLs published by the source feed. This means that when a visitor views a social wall containing remote images, the visitor’s browser may contact those media servers directly and transmit normal request information such as the visitor’s IP address, browser headers and the requested media URL.

Bigfoot Open Wall does not itself add analytics, tracking scripts, advertising services or third-party JavaScript.

Because Mastodon, Pixelfed and generic RSS/Atom feeds can be hosted by many independent providers, there is no single third-party service or privacy policy that applies to all configured sources. Site administrators should review the privacy policies and terms of the specific feed and media providers they choose to configure.