Mastodon Syndication

Spent a little time working on syndicating blog posts to Mastodon. I’ve had different syndication schemes in the past like Twitter, Facebook, and even Mastodon, but they’ve all used IFTTT. Unfortunately, it seems that enshitification has caught up with IFTTT and you can’t do much interesting on their free service level any more.

So, this time I’m trying Zapier (rhymes with happier.) I’ve messed with a little in the past, thought it was kinda nice. So, I waded in again today.

When you add a new snap, new to me since last time, they give you an AI agent to get the ball rolling. So I said:

I’d like to syndicate my blog posts to Mastodon via my RSS feed.

With that, it figured out that I want the fetch block to get my RSS feed and find the latest entry and then hand off to a different 3rd party service to do the actual post to Mastodon. Sounds good to me. It put the pipeline together and prompted for the bits to find the RSS and talk to my Mastodon server. All straightforward and understandable.

Got to the part where it tried to test the pipeline and kaboom:

Can’t use the post to Mastodon feature until to you subscribe to unshape.

Sigh, would have been nice to told me about that earlier. My feast or famine blog posting style doesn’t warrant the $6/month service level.

So, I asked the agent:

Can you replace the unshape part with a direct call to my Mastodon server’s API?

Sure, we can do that. It updated the pipeline and prompted me for app token to talk to the Mastodon server (with some help on where you generate the token on the Mastodon server side.) It then tested the pipeline and made a Mastodon post for the latest blog post as expected. Nice.

Lets see if the pipeline just works for a real post.