social

Croissant, a social media cross-posting app

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A screenshot of the Croissant app on an iPhone 13 Mini

If you cast your minds back around three years, there was just one major public-facing text-based social media platform: Twitter. Now that Twitter is called X, and only Nazis and grifters seem to be left there, we’ve ended up with some people on Bluesky, some on Threads and others on Mastodon. And so Croissant makes it easy to cross-post to all three at once.

Although I mainly post on Bluesky these days, I try to keep my accounts on Threads and Mastodon active as well.

Once you have linked your accounts to Croissant, you get a nice big space to write your post, and a character count. Whilst Threads doesn’t seem to impose a maximum character limit, it’s 300 characters on Bluesky, and 500 on most Mastodon instances.

Below, there are buttons to @mention someone (which includes a search tool on Mastodon and Bluesky), add hashtags and add images. What I particularly like about Croissant is that, when you add an image, there’s a really clear prompt to add an alt text description of the image. Draft posts can be saved, and you can set how visible the post will be on Mastodon and Threads (public, unlisted etc.). You can also add content warnings if posting to Mastodon.

Although Croissant is free to download, to unlock most features you’ll need to pay an annual subscription of £20. Also, it’s only available for iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later; my elderly sixth generation iPad can only manage iOS 17 so I’m only able to run it on my iPhone.

Cross-posting on socials

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An AI-generated image using Microsoft Copilot showing a stack with the WordPress logo surrounded by smaller stacks with social media logos on them

I’ve recently updated the Feeds page to list ways other ways that you can follow this blog, besides subscribing to the RSS feed. To summarise:

  • There’s the weekly email
  • Any Fediverse app (e.g. Mastodon, Friendica) can follow the blog directly using ‘@nrturner’
  • There’s now a dedicated Facebook page
  • I’m automatically cross-posting links to new blog posts to X/Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky

The Facebook and X/Twitter integration is being done via Buffer and the WP to Buffer plugin. This is because Buffer is one of the few services that still has write access to the X/Twitter API. It also means that I am using my X/Twitter account again, but only to link to my own blog posts. I’m not logging in to interact with other users or post anything there that isn’t a link out to something I host. At least, not until Elon Musk inevitably gets bored, bankrupt or both and sells X/Twitter to someone better.

I think I used to have a dedicated Facebook page for this blog in the past, but I must’ve deleted it at some point. Anyway, there’s a new one which has been around for a couple of weeks and has had basically zero interactions in that time. If you want to very occasionally see my blog posts on your news feed, when the Facebook algorithm deems me worthy, feel free to give it a ‘Like’. I won’t be incorporating any of Meta’s cookies or adtech into this web site, don’t worry.

To cross-post to Mastodon, I’m using the Share on Mastodon plugin. It’s simple but configurable, and does the job well. For Bluesky, I’m using Neznam Atproto Share, which is also simple but configurable. I quite like relatively simple WordPress plugins that just do one or two things, and don’t try to take over your dashboard.

Whilst I have a Threads account, Meta hasn’t opened an API for it yet, so no auto-posts there. Mastodon remains my primary public social media presence, but I do scroll through Bluesky regularly too.