I’ve been considering adding a simple like button for awhile now – just to give a people a way to say they enjoyed a post without needing to go to the trouble of typing out a full comment. I didn’t want to use the official WordPress one because it ties being able to like things into having an official WordPress account (which most random visitors won’t have) and also means your activity is likely being logged to them as well (I’ve avoided Jetpack for similar reasons, I’d like to avoid having external trackers on here where I can).
I ended up settling on WP Ulike, a like plugin that claims GDPR compliance by minimizing what it logs and as far as I’ve been able to determine, isn’t sending any data anywhere but a dashboard in my admin console. Some parts of it do feel like I’m not the original audience (the dashboard has a lot of ‘optimize your content’ messaging, clearly aimed more at businesses), but it does look like it does what I need.
You should see a like button at the bottom of posts now. Much like the Mastodon like button all it does is tell me you liked my post. No algorithm or advertiser should be getting any data from that, but I’ll feel happier knowing you enjoyed it.