Cross-posting to Twitter, Medium, Mastodon, and more

Now that you have a blog that contains all your microblog posts, you can wire it up to Twitter to automatically cross-post them as tweets. You’re writing on your own site first, but the posts still go out to your Twitter followers. You can also enable cross-posting to other supported services.

Micro.blog comes with built-in, native cross-posting to Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Mastodon. You can access it under the “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting” button on your account.

Next to the RSS feed you would like to automatically cross-post, just click the “Add Twitter” link. You’ll be prompted to authorize your Twitter account, or an account on another service.

Once enabled, any new posts (after you enable cross-posting) will be sent to Twitter, with these rules:

  • Short posts without a title, and less than 280 characters, will be sent to Twitter unmodified.
  • Longer posts without a title, but longer than 280 characters, will be truncated with a link back to your microblog.
  • Posts with a title, regardless of length, will be sent to Twitter using the title and a link back to your microblog to read the full post.
  • Up to 4 photos embedded in a post are automatically downloaded and attached to your tweet. Photos should be larger than 200×200, to avoid accidentally cross-posting small buttons and tracking images that some blog systems include.
  • The first link in a post will be appended as a URL to the end of the tweet.

Similar rules apply for Medium, LinkedIn, and Mastodon, but with different length restrictions since the 280-character limit is specific to Twitter.

You can continue to reply and bookmark directly on Twitter, and also on Micro.blog. Replies posted directly on Micro.blog aren’t included in your microblog RSS feed, so they won’t be sent to Twitter.

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I’ve been using HEY World since day one and configured my RSS feed in my cross-posting settings enabling a cross-post to my Medium account. My posts on HEY World are fetched and put on my timeline but Those never got cross-published to Medium even if I enabled that option. Is it possible to look at this?

Unfortunately we don’t current log the errors for Medium separately, so it’s hard to track down since it looks like the Twitter cross-posts from the Hey World feed went through fine. If you haven’t tried it yet, you may want to disable Medium and re-authenticate to make sure it still has access to your Medium account. I’ll look into this a little more too.

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Ok, I did the disable and re-enable thing. On the latter, it didn’t ask me to re-authenticate… I guess the access token was still valid?

Not sure if this is the right place but pops up as the first link when I search for Embed.

I’m trying to embed one of my year-old post on a Blot blog but from my archives when I browse to that post, I don’t see an embed link. I’m guessing it is currently available only on the timeline. Any chance of searching for it on the timeline to get the embed code?

Same issue after disabling and enabling cross post to medium.

Medium cross-posts only worked for me briefly back in August '20 when I had it on the basic everything RSS feed.
Since I’ve created my own Category feed it has never worked on multiple refreshes, even when Mastodon, Twit, LI have all worked on same one!

@manton if you are going to give your Medium connection an overhaul, here’s the recommendations I gave for optimisations to support email again:

Linking back to original

In Medium’s story settings, there’s an option to put a canonical link to the original article. I think this boosts the original article in SEO.

I noticed that you add automatically the original, which is awesome!

I’m just curious: did that happen automatically, or did you have to customize the Medium api? It would seem to not be in Medium’s interest to automatically enable this as it reduces their visibility.

To go one step further, can we send the same message to humans too, i.e. automatically add a line actually in the story text at the bottom: like “This was originally published at: blog.w4rner …” ??

Meter story for Medium Partner Program

Can we customize api to set this on instead?

PastedGraphic-3

Frankly, this is the only good reason I can see to cross-post to Medium.

Tags

You can add up to 5 on Medium natively.

Could the API automatically add ones based on first 5 #hashtags in M.b title & text?

e.g. here) would add IndieWeb as a Medium tag.

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I disabled Medium cross-posting as this feature doesn’t work. It should be removed until further notice, IMHO. A bit frustrating, if you ask me.

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I’ve been testing Medium cross-posting this morning and it’s working fine for me. @numericcitizen, I’ll take a closer look at your account and see if there’s anything specific interfering.

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Thanks, let me know!

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Another HEY World not being cross-posted to Medium. I quit. :frowning_face:

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Technically, I have a Medium account that I have never used. If you’d like, I could tinker around and see if I can get cross-posting to it up and running. (The implication being we may be able to troubleshoot what is happening with your setup).

Update: I went ahead anyway to see if I can generate any traffic (not holding my breath) and my two posts this morning showed up. Holler if you want another set of eyes on the problem you are having.

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Hi, ok, here is what I did today:

  • reset the auth method on Medium to use Sign In with Apple.
  • revoked access to Micro.blog from the Medium account settings page.
  • on my Micro.blog account page, re-enabled cross-posting to Medium and cross-posting in general for my HEY world feed just like shown below. Will see on my next HEY World post.
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I did another try this morning… my HEY World article was syndicated to Twitter normally, as configured… but not on Medium. It’s not a simple blog post… it contains images… I’m still waiting for it to appear on Medium… :thinking:

here is the source link:

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I ran into the “too many stories” wall yesterday (post ended up in drafts) trying to get a category specific cross-post today.

Might be worth sending a test post limited to one image to see if we can get anything to stick.

Update: tossing Tumblr into the mix. Looks like the JSON feed works as expected for what I am sending. No luck yet with Tumblr or Medium in getting the rss feed to cross-post (which I introduced to filter only stuff worth cross-posting).

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See if you have a JSON version of your feed to try out. If RSS isn’t working for me perhaps atom isn’t working for you.

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On JF Martin Is provided. .rss doesn’t work it seems. Maybe if I just enter: JF Martin And MB would figure it all out?

What is your base address as seen by Micro.blog? Example: I jumped back into society with Micro.blog so they are hosting me at moondeer.micro.blog. I then added a custom domain name so I could simply be moondeer.blog.

I ask because Imma have to piddle with some trial and error to get a handle on the Hugo generated feeds and how Micro.blog is interpreting our cross-post configurations.

I’m using numericcitizen.micro.blog. Cannot see how this would make a difference, though.

It wouldn’t, just trying to get my head around stuff. I am in the process of dissecting how Hugo is generating the JSON feed so I can create a category specific feed of my own. If I can figure that out we may be able to figure out how to get a feed working with your setup.