Hey team! I want to add some information to this thread since I just made an attempt to build a piece of this.
Creating the link topic seems to be covered by this plugin: https://github.com/danskdynamit/discourse-links-category
What I attempted was the upvote plugin. I found that without a significant amount of duplication of code and monkey-patching, it’s not possible to break out the like button and reuse it elsewhere. In order to add this like/vote button on the topic list, that’s exactly what you would need to do.
Currently, the like button is created within the widget for the post-menu. And since the like button has multiple actions tied to it, extracting it out of that widget isn’t a simple task. This is especially true when you account for those actions only being available from child widgets, which you can’t create from a plugin. So you would have to recreate the necessary actions and duplicate code.
As a community manager, my recommendation would be to sit tight and wait for plugins to be able to do this.
As a plugin author and contributor, I would ask if it’s possible to break the buttons in the post-menu out into their own widgets. I don’t think that would be too difficult and could likely lead to a lot of flexibility in authoring plugins.