The State of API-Powered Publishing to Social Media Networks

If you’re blogging like I’m doing here, it’s nice to be able to kick your posts out automatically to social networks (in addition to RSS). A reasonable list right now:

• Mastodon
• Twitter (X)
• Facebook
• Threads
• LinkedIn
• Bluesky

There are many more sites we’d consider social networks, but they aren’t as obviously a good fit for sharing blog posts. Instagram is a big social media player, but the best you can do for blog posts is publish a pull quote as an image or something and then do the “link in bio” to get someone to the post, and that’s too janky to be worth it to me. Same with Pinterest. YouTube and TikTok are entirely video-focused, so they aren’t what I’m dealing with here.

Medium feels weird to me in a way that’s hard to put my finger on. As in, you really should put the entire blog post there, but then it feels like that is the canonical post somehow in a way I don’t like. Even though I prefer putting the entire post in RSS, which is also literally syndication, so how is that so different? I also feel like Tumblr could maybe be on the list, but I don’t understand the culture of Tumblr enough to know if link-to-blog-post-posts are useful or desirable there in any way.

I’m also personally dealing with WordPress here, so I’m going to take that angle, even though what actually matters is the social network’s APIs that make it possible or not. I’ll take them one by one here.

• 👍 Mastodon — Perfectly easy to do this. Jetpack Social can do it. Buffer can do it (if you’re using WordPress I guess you’d WP to Buffer). FS Poster can do it. I have found the Share on Mastodon plugin to be the most elegant integration so I’ve stuck with that for now, but ideally I’d like to consolidate my approach somehow.
• 👎 Twitter (X) — Their API was all shuffled up recently and caused most integrations to break. Buffer can still do it, but Jetpack Social killed that integration. I’m trying a plugin called FS Poster, but I can’t get it to work. You have to sign up to use the API and “create an app” and all this awkward stuff, and despite following the instructions, it feels helplessly broken. There is also XPoster which looks similar (needing API keys) except entirely focused on X. Has anyone tried it? If it works, that would be nice, but a bummer that it’s a one-off and not part of a combo tool that can do all of them.
• 👎 Facebook — Lots of apps claim to be able to do this for you — all of them that I’ve mentioned so far — but they only allow you to publish to “Groups” and “Pages”. Best I can tell, Facebook doesn’t allow you to automate posting to personal profiles. That’s where I’d want to publish personal blog posts, so that sucks. What the heck? Are there any options at all here?
• 👍 Threads — This is how I found FS Poster in the first place. You auth with your username and password, and it’s good to go. That’s how all these integrations should work. Threads is so new, though, that FS Poster is the only thing I found that can do it.
• 👍 LinkedIn — Same as Threads. Easy peasy with either FS Poster or Jetpack Social.
• 👎 Bluesky — No automated service I’ve seen yet supports it. But it appears to have a very clear and simple API (example code looks very basic). There is a beta-looking WordPress plugin, but it seems to be broken.

	Mastodon	Twitter (X)	Facebook	Threads	LinkedIn	Bluesky
Buffer	✅	✅	🟡	❌	✅	❌
Jetpack Social	✅	❌	🟡	❌	✅	❌
FS Poster	🟡	🟡	🟡	✅	✅	❌
Micro.blog	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Has One-Off Plugin	🔗	🔗	❌	❌	🔗	🟡

My ideal here is one super-plugin that posts to my entire list with a minimum of fuss. There doesn’t seem to be a great option at the moment. Nor is just going with a suite of one-offs. There are some other options I took a look at but seemed too outdated or janky looking for me to seriously consider.

If Buffer could do Threads and Bluesky I’d probably find a way to consolidate around that, because it can do Twitter (X) without trouble which is pretty rare. I want to like Jetpack Social because it’s so directly integrated into WordPress, but it doesn’t have Twitter (X), Threads, or Bluesky, so it seems the least likely to be a winner but I’d be happy to be wrong. I wanted to love FS Poster, and it’s come through nicely on Threads and LinkedIn, but the fact that I can’t get Twitter (X) going and the fact that the Mastodon integration is more complex than it needs to be, and the fact it also can’t do Bluesky means it’s just not hitting for me.

Update: added Micro.blog which seems to be the one thing supporting Bluesky along with others at the moment.

Hellllp.