I’m starting my post with the question, so if anyone has answer it can point me to will make it easier:
I like to fine tune the cross-posting a bit, so that I can configure what to do differently per category. Is there any better way, recommendation, best practice to properly implement that?
Because I’ve always struggled to get a consistent behavior for that, it never really worked flawlessly for me. I tried different approaches and configurations, recently even removed all configurations started from scratch, but in the end ends up the same: sometimes it posts, sometimes it doesn’t.
Looking at the interface I get even more confused: in the logs there are no errors, it only tries to cross to some services, but not all configured for that category. Also, in the post edit screen, the “Show Cross-posting” option is giving just a few of the configured services, seems like it’s showing the configuration of just one of the categories (but can’t tell which).
Currently what I tried in Sources is:
Removed the default configuration with the main feed of the blog.
Added each category feed separately and configured cross-posting for each, despite having the " Conflicting feeds" message.
The short answer is no, there’s no way to control crossposting by category in Micro.blog. Crossposting is either setup or not, and then either on by default or not for each service. You can have feeds per category you supply to an external crossposting service, but crossposting will always occur based on what is in your main source feed and go out to your defaults, unless you override for a specific post.
I thought this should be possible. I remember something being announced that crossposting can be different for each incoming feed. It’s not really something I do myself so I don’t know if it actually works.
But I do know that a post cannot be cross-posted automatically unless it is publishing to the Micro.blog feed. The M.b feed is the source for the crosspost rather than the hosted source post.
You can do that, but each category feed you add back will go out to all the same crossposting services. You can’t set a source feed → specific cross post service. You also cannot have a post appear in two different feeds that go into the source feed-- that can create issues, so the many to one relationship of category to feeds will cause problems.
The primary thing I’ve heard discussed is the reverse-- automatically adding a category to a feed that comes from an external source-- but not specific crossposting based on sources.
That’s what I used: removed the blog default feed in Sources, and the category feeds with different crosspost settings. And the plan was not to post in multiple categories.
What I noticed is the crossposted services, as seen in the logs, don’t match the ones configured in the category’s feed settings.
Since you’re noticing a mismatch in the the logs, it sounds like something is definitely not working as expected. That said, this thread is challenging everything I thought I knew about categories and cross-posting: I also thought I could omit the primary feed from cross posting and add individual category feeds to cross-post to specific services, such as a LinkedIN category that would post to LinkedIN and only LinkedIN and a Mastodon category that would post to Mastodon and only Mastodon. My thought was that if I then wanted to post to both LinkedIn and Mastodon, I could add a post to both categories, however, it sounds like that won’t work. I guess this isn’t as important now as cross-posting can be set on an individual post basis, but depending on how content is posted to MB, controlling those individual post settings isn’t always possible.
Yeah, no part of this works. You can omit the primary feed from crossposting and add a category or number of category feeds (with unique posts) instead. You cannot set automatic crossposting based on the source feed or the category of a post. I do believe this has come up as a request many times, but it’s just not how the system works.
All the disclaimers people have mentioned are correct, but on my first glance at your feeds it does appear that your setup should work. I’m not seeing any overlap of posts between categories. That’s usually the main problem because Micro.blog won’t process a single post multiple times, essentially.
Have you checked the Account → View logs page? After your next post, check there and you should see Micro.blog log what it has decided about where to post and any status messages that come back from external services. I see some did post today to Threads and Nostr.
Usually I do that, take a look at the logs, and that’s more confusing, because there are no errors, it’s just tries to publish to a list of services that doesn’t match exactly its category.
Could it be a Threads issue? Because my last post should’ve posted to Threads, based on the category, but it didn’t. Although I remember something similar with Pixelfed.
@jsonbecker That does not make sense at all, and if so is totally misleading, because each feed can have it’s own cross posting settings. And if that’s the case my latest post should’ve crossposted somewhere but didn’t, neither the global (whichever those are) or the configured for that category. The behavior feels totally random.
Sometimes it doesn’t crosspost at all, sometimes it crossposts just to the services that appear in the posting options in the Crosspost section in the posting.
