Github Actions RSS to social media auto-poster?
I‘ve had my head out of social media for some time now, but I checked in on Mastodon a few days ago, looking into some inconsistencies in the blog’s RSS feeds, and I discovered that the auto poster I had been using has been posting but all the posts looked horrendous. It’s a combination of several things, including changes I have made to the blog over the past few months, changes I made to the RSS feeds, and having the auto poster settings that no longer made any sense. It was a complete mess.
I have spend a few hours updating the auto-poster so at least it has the right feeds and settings now, but I feel like I need a more cohesive strategy, because once I have it solved for Mastodon, I will have to do the same for Twitter, and Bluesky, and Nostr etc etc. I had a quick look for a commercial product, but I couldn't find any that had all the features I wanted, and that were affordable. I don’t actually want anything too complicated. It’s starting to feel like I will need to roll my own.
What I would really like is to have a Github Actions workflow that runs every so often, read an RSS feed, and posts the latest things in the feed to social media. The simplest would be some sort of CLI tool I could run, but I haven’t found anything yet. I did find several community made actions like this one, and this one, and this one. None of these feel very maintained. There is of course Textcasting, but it’s not at all obvious how I could turn that into something I could run in a Github Action.
I feel like this was something we used to do much more easily in the early days of blogging. Maybe I’m not remembering clearly, perhaps it was a mess back then too. Anyway, just blogging about it in case the universe is feeling like going in this sort of a direction.
It’s completely wild that so many millions of people apparently use these social media platforms, and have been for decades, and that there are so many millions of folks apparently writing open source software, yet something as basic as an RSS auto-poster isn’t a solved problem. You would think that this would be almost the first thing that would get solved. What is up with that? #