Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, my interest in maintaining XPoster (née WP to Twitter) has been pretty low. Last year I invested the time to add Mastodon support, but while I’ve found Mastodon to be a much more inviting world than Twitter, it’s never really had a huge impact.
Adding Bluesky support felt legitimately fun; it was the first time in a long time that I’ve actually enjoyed working on the plugin.
It was a good reminder that when things are fun to interact with, they feel worthwhile. Long before Elon Musk took over Twitter, working with the API (Application Programming Interface) had ceased to be fun – early on, it was easy, but unreliable. Then it became difficult to work with, but reliable. (Although the documentation was sometimes just flat out incorrect.)
Under Musk, it’s become both difficult to work with and unreliable. Errors increased in frequency, but so have API and policy changes. Basically just frustrating.
Bluesky is currently a lot like the early Twitter; and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
Overall, I hope that it stays fun. But for right now, it was nice to be able to spend a solid week head down in the code, make some improvements, and feel like it was worthwhile.
John Doe
This is a great update! I’m excited to see the new features.
Joe Dolson
Yeah, I can see that your link is pointing to a page with `og` tags, but isn’t rendering them. Bluesky is a little strange; it requires the client to do a lot of parsing, and it looks like I may need to parse those characteristics as part of the post to Bluesky, as well.
Mastodon and X do all the parsing for you – you just send a string with links, tags, mentions, etc.; but with Bluesky you have to parse the string for links, tags, and mentions on the client side or it won’t render them. Looks like that’s also true for cards.
Alias79
Ah, ok, I understand, but I don’t mean uploading images with the post to Bluesky, but rather that the post in Bluesky loads the image from the WordPress post, like the “Twitter Card” is loaded on Twitter.
Joe Dolson
If you’re not using Pro, then you’re not getting images uploaded on any of the services – those are only supported in XPoster Pro. You may be seeing them in some environments, however, due to appropriate OpenGraph tags coming from other plugins, such as Yoast SEO.
But XPoster Pro is enabled to upload images to Bluesky. It is a bit complicated, like the other plugin developer mentioned – but it’s similar to how it works on X. Mastodon is a lot easier, though.
Alias79
Joe, we love you at NextN <3<3<3 We've tried a few plugins over the past few months, and there weren't many options. The ones I tried didn't work either.
In our case, the first message we sent worked on the first try, but the image wasn't sent either. In one of those plugins I tried previously ("Share on Bluesky"), the plugin designer commented the following about images:
"""image is not implemented yet, because bluesky is overly complicated with links and images… you have to upload the image to their servers first, to then reference it… it is not possible to simply link it, like it is in the Fediverse
But I plan to support at least featured images!"""
Is it possible that it's because of some issue regarding how Bluesky currently works?
I can't thank you enough Joe!
Joe Dolson
Well, XPoster definitely never does anything with direct messages, and I didn’t do any testing with that option enabled at any point, so I don’t know exactly what it does.
Images on Bluesky are narrowly constrained on size, with considerably smaller limits than on any other service; they have a maximum size of 1 MB (Megabyte). You may want to check and see what size the images you’re sending are.
STEVE
Hey Joe,
Just started using your Xposter plugin free version, and it is very useful. It has taken quite a while to figure out the individual custom field settings required for each RSS (Really Simple Syndication) importer, but think it is now finished and working great for Mastodon. Have added Bluesky, but it won’t import images. Also, had to check the box to “Allow access to your direct messages” in order to get a working combination so that Bluesky would post fromXposter; but, no matter what, images don’t come in on Bluesky posts, just text. Perhaps am missing something, but there were no apparent instructions other than get the token. Thanks again.