Switched my social media posting from paid Make to self-hosted n8n and Postiz
For the past few years I've been using the paid service called Make to pull my blog posts from my RSS feed in WordPress, and push that out to various social media services. I am on a grandfathered legacy plan, so I am paying only half of the normal cos, but it was especially complicated to set up for Bluesky. So much so, that in the end I actually ditched make for that and set up a free Buffer account just to post to Bluesky. And make had no support at all for MeWe or Nostr, so those I did manually.
In the end I was posting to 16 places, but doing a manual process for 6 of those services.
I've been eyeing out Postiz for a bit, and finally realised yesterday that it could handle 8 of my destination sites in one go, including MeWe and Nostr. I'd have to drop Tumblr, but to be honest a full year goes by before I get any reply or response on Tumblr. I now only need to manually do the post creation on 4 sites, and that anyway includes my WordPress blog post.
But one thing I realised is that with Make I had tweaked the code so that it shortened posts for Mastodon and Bluesky, and it also picked up that if I used a tag like opensource, it would send that post specifically to my Bluesky open source profile. Postiz could auto-post from my RSS feed, but it would not do the processing to shorten posts for some sites, and route others based on a tag.
Enter n8n. So n8n watches my RSS feed, and does all that logic processing for me. I just needed a code block for the processing, and a switch block to route to the different sites depending on whether it was a technology and/or opensource tag being used. n8n then pushes out to each channel in my Postiz service (see featured image top of this post for the n8n layout). It arrives in Postiz already formatted with the image, tags, etc.
There is one thing that is not working, and that is the alt-text for images. Although that is processed inside n8n fine, the final Postiz node in n8n, seems to strip away the alt-text. I've logged an issue for that as I'd like it sorted out.
This is my first post using n8n and Postiz, so hopefully it gets though. It will only include the featured image from my blog post (same as with Make) so one does have to visit my original blog link if it is a more complex post with a number of images in (like this post is).
So my social media posting is again free, open source, and self-hosted.
Strictly speaking I could even post directly from n8n, but some services would require HTTP POST and that can be a bit messy. Postiz gives easy management of reposting, as well as analytics from LinkedIn Pages. Postiz is pretty heavy on resources sometimes peaking to 2 GB of RAM because of Elasticsearch, whilst n8n is super lightweight to run.
See
https://gadgeteer.co.za/switched-my-social-media-posting-from-paid-make-to-self-hosted-n8n-and-postiz
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