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

Okay so I got crossposting to work but it’s still not reliable. How I got it to work? Not sure but I did remove my microblog’s main feed link from the crossposting settings yesterday and only had crossposting on for category feeds. After that, Twitter and Mastodon crossposting worked although some posts haven’t gone to Medium at all, and some crossposts are publishing raw HTML on Medium and Tumblr.

Update: Cross posting stopped working again. Today’s post got posted on Twitter but not on Mastodon, Medium or Tumblr. :confused:
I really want crossposting to work as I consider it a crucial feature to my usage of the service.

Catching up on this discussion. Cross-posting does not work from category feeds unless a given post only appears in at most one category feed. In other words, to work reliably, you can add multiple category feeds (each of which contain different posts) but can’t have the default feed.json.

The reason for this is because of how Micro.blog processes feeds for cross-posting. When a new post is found, Micro.blog checks whether it needs to be cross-posted, and then to make sure it doesn’t accidentally cross-post something twice, it skips processing it if it’s encountered again in another feed. I’ve thought about how to remove this limitation, but for now it’s tricky to use categories for cross-posting.

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Would be really nice to get an official answer regarding cross-posting to Medium issues, though.

When this was first reported, I enabled Medium cross-posting again for my account and it has been working great for me for various types of posts (https://manton.medium.com), so it’s still a mystery why it’s not working reliably for some people. I’m hoping I can add something that will help us debug this.

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Sometimes disabling & enabling, and refreshing seems to help.

Sometimes posts don’t seem to go if too soon after a previous one.

This is useful to know the ‘in 1 category feed’. I guess that’s why I’ve had some success with my very clear #arts or #tech bifurcation.

As the others say, Medium seems a separate issue which would be great to explore!
I’d personally would also be open to cross-posting to similar higher-footfall platforms if integration easier e.g. Substack.

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Update: I removed the category feeds from crossposting settings after @manton’s cleared when it would and wouldn’t work (thanks!), and tried only the main RSS feed. Medium still didn’t work, and Tumblr had formatting issues. But then I removed the RSS feed and added the default JSON feed. Everything, including Medium, is working perfectly since the last 4-5 days! So maybe as @Moondeer pointed out, there could be something off about RSS specifically. In any case, I’m too afraid to swap feeds and test again since everything is finally working. But I’m glad it is. :slight_smile:

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Thanks! HEY World only support ATOM RSS feeds. I’m out of luck until @manton update the cross-posting engine to support more formats.

Or until the much better resourced team making Hey update their product.

Or more ressources on the MB side… as I think in recent weeks there is some lack of active improvements…

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What type of resources would you suggest? As far as I’m aware there is no quick way to solve for a pandemic or add more developers, other than terrible VC funding and the like.

Is MB a side-line for @manton ? Is there other people involved in maintaining this platform? I wasn’t expecting the pandemic to be an issue for an internet-only business like MB. I could be wrong, for sure.

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Good questions. However, I think I’ve derailed the thread topic by this point. So I’ll just post my reply on my blog.

agghh: a trade-off:
Either
a) (as you do) forego categories and post to Medium / others more reliably (with main JSON)
or b) (as I do) use RSS categories to split destinations but accept Medium is a no-go and others may be janky

I’ll stick with b because of my specific arts | tech audience split, and the fact that I’m hopeful that @manton will solve tech problem / Medium will be swamped by another platform like Substack anyway if not :smiley:

The problem is simple: work one what exactly? Do you have access to MB back-end?

My experience with Medium crossposting is that they are crossposting, but in Medium they aren’t showing their title. I think maybe medium has a difference between the title of the post (in the edit/list view) and actually including that title in the post itself.

I’ve confirmed what @toddgrotenhuis said. We are passing the title to Medium in the API, but according to the Medium documentation it does not show that title directly:

The title of the post. Note that this title is used for SEO and when rendering the post as a listing, but will not appear in the actual post—for that, the title must be specified in the content field as well.

I’m making a change to Micro.blog today to add an h1 header tag at the top of the cross-posted content that will include the title. Thanks everyone!

can anyone verify whether this has made it work for them, including cases where it wasn’t posting at all?

One thing I wish we could do is change how posts are cross-posted to Twitter. Currently, if a post contains a title, just the title and a link back to the post are sent to Twitter. What I’d love to be able to do is to have the title post, and then also as much of the beginning of the post that would fit with a link back – essentially, I want to optimize Twitter’s 280 character limit in cases where the title and link are shorter than 280 characters. Also, having the truncated beginning of the post provides a sort of preview which I think is handy on Twitter. I realize not every user might like this, so maybe this could be functionality added via a plugin to override the default MB behavior? This would also come in handy for podcast posts as the beginning of the description and not just the title would be cross-posted. Any thoughts?

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