Heckl Tools

No. With the optional ActivityPub plugin installed, your WordPress site itself becomes a Fediverse identity. You can follow people from Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc., without joining any other server.

No, it’s optional. Heckl Tools works without it — you can still follow RSS feeds and WordPress.com Reader subscriptions, import archives, manage favorites, and use the unified timeline. Without ActivityPub, the only thing you lose is Fediverse follows (and the ability to federate your own posts outward). If you later install the ActivityPub plugin, Fediverse functionality lights up automatically.

Yes. RSS / Atom feeds (with WebSub push when the publisher supports it) and WordPress.com Reader subscriptions work alongside ActivityPub follows on the same timeline.

It stays on your WordPress site. There’s no Heckl Tools cloud service. The plugin contacts the third-party services listed below — and only those — only when you take an explicit action.

Your feed items, follows, and favorites are stored as standard WordPress posts and meta, so they remain in the database after deactivation. Cron schedules and WebSub subscriptions are cleaned up on deactivation.

By default, uninstall preserves your feed items, favorites, and follow lists — Heckl Tools is often used as a personal archive of content you’ve collected, so silently wiping that on uninstall would be a data-loss surprise. Only plugin-internal flags (cron coordination, transients, OAuth tokens) are removed.

If you’d rather have a clean wipe on uninstall, turn on Settings → Following → “Delete all data when the plugin is uninstalled” before removing the plugin. With that toggle on, uninstall also removes the feed items, follow records, favorites, custom taxonomies, and all plugin options.

Only if you’re still on the WordPress default (“Plain”). Pretty permalinks are required for the ActivityPub WebFinger endpoint and for our own /following/ and /favorites/ URLs to resolve, so on activation we set the permalink structure to /%postname%/ when none is set. Any non-default permalink structure you’ve already chosen is left alone.