Sharing my work on social channels is not my idea of a good time. It’s useful, people find my projects, and I get feedback. But the actual act of posting is out of my comfort zone. So I built something that does it for me.
ai-socials provides some basic hooks to allow posting across multiple channels. Then I can just point an AI agent at that project and tell it to make a post, and the system handles formatting and publishing. Having my own tool removes a lot of the friction and actually encourages me to put things out there instead of letting them sit in a draft folder forever.
The catch: getting onto those platforms in the first place.
Blue Sky and Mastodon both had APIs hooked up to crosspost, which worked well for text but when I tried to post a video the system only accepted GIFs. I ended up adding specific handling for Bluesky and probably need to do the same for mastadon.
Twitter moved their API behind a paywall. Fair enough from their side, but I’m not paying to post. I’d rather not use the platform than subscribe just to automate a few updates. So Twitter isn’t in the mix.
Reddit locked down their API too, understandable given abuse and bots. For legitimate, light-touch automation like “post my blog post to a couple of subreddits,” it still stings. In the end I had to use a headless browser to submit posts. It works, but it’s brittle and feels like the opposite of what an API is for. I get why platforms are locking things down; it’s just painful when you’re trying to do something simple.
So far, ai-socials is doing what I need: posting to multiple channels without me having to open a web browser. If that sounds useful, the project is on GitHub and is pretty quick to get running. This isn’t meant to be a solution for everyone. It’s a bespoke system tied to my workflow. AI wrote all the code in a few hours, and I don’t care if it all gets thrown away. What’s important is having a system that lets me move quickly.