How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT I successfully hooked up IFTTT to Mastodon to auto-post from another site! I use IFTTT as glue for linking several services together including sharing interesting links from Pocket when I’m offline: I can add a tag in the app on my tablet, and then when it syncs that tag up to the cloud, IFTTT will pick it up and create the share post on whichever service I’ve tagged it for.* I also use it to pull from RSS and WordPress to publish new blog posts. This should also work on other Fediverse server software that supports the Mastodon API, though they all have their own ways of getting at the authorization token. So far I’ve tested it successfully with GoToSocial (a lightweight server for smallish instances) and Snac (an ultra-minimalist server) . My main source was this April 2017 post by @[email protected]. It was already out of date when I started in December, but it pointed me in the right direction, and I wrote up the details here. Since then, I’ve continued updating this article to add more detail, make corrections, help troubleshoot problems, and address changes in IFTTT’s system and in the broader social media landscape. Before You Start As of 2024, IFTTT only offers Webhooks with a paid IFTTT Pro subscription. It’s cheap [redacted], but not entirely free. Brid.gy is a lot easier to set up (and is always free), so if it supports the site/software you want to cross-post from, I recommend using it instead. But if you want to pull from an RSS/Atom feed, or anything else that Bridgy doesn’t support, or customize features like post visibility, this will let you connect just about anything. If you’re hooking up something that’s already automatic, rather than something triggered by your own actions on another site — especially if you don’t plan on posting to the same account manually — I recommend looking for a bot-friendly Mastodon instance. I used to just recommend BotsIn.Space, but they’re shutting down in December 2024. For now, just make sure you check with the admin on the instance you plan on using. 1. Set up IFTTT’s Webhooks On IFTTT, go to Webhooks. Activate it by clicking on the Connect button. 2. Set up Mastodon to allow IFTTT as an application Go to Preferences/Development/Your Applications on your Mastodon instance (ex: on mastodon.social it’s here). Click on New Application. Enter the following: Name: IFTTT Website: https://ifttt.com UPDATE November 2022: When I first posted this article, I thought you only needed maker.ifttt.com to match the source of the API calls. In April/June 2022, I updated the article under the mistaken impression that Mastodon now needed the full URL generated by the IFTTT webhook service, like IFTTT needs the API key from Mastodon. This was wrong. I didn’t test it properly, and didn’t notice that this field isn’t for authentication, it’s exposed in a link when a post is viewed by itself on the web. If you followed on my mistake, I highly recommend (1) removing the URL from your Mastodon config and just putting in ifttt.com and (2) going into your Webhooks settings at IFTTT and generating a new key. Thank you so much to @h3rb1 for pointing out my mistake. Scopes: write:statuses Submit the app. Now open the new app you’ve created and look up the access token for the next step. 2a. Other software that uses the Mastodon API Snac makes it easy – you just go to the following URL (replace example.com with your snac server), log in, and it’ll display the new token. https://example.com/oauth/x-snac-get-token GoToSocial hasn’t built the tools to generate a token yet, but you can use their authentication examples with curl to generate one manually. It’s a pain, but you only have to do it once per application. (Note that for GTS you’ll also need to add a User-Agent line to the headers, since GTS requires it but IFTTT apparently doesn’t send one unless you tell it to.) 3. Create an IFTTT app! Go back to IFTTT and create a new app. For example, I created an app triggered by Pocket, whenever an item is tagged share-mastodon. You could also set it up to autopost every time you blog with a specific tag, or every new item in an RSS feed, or all kinds of things. Even cross-post from Facebook or “the birdsite” (Twitter). Since IFTTT has rearranged their site to make it easier to use pre-built recipes — sorry, apps — here are the steps to get to the point where you can build your own. Click on the “Get More” button at the top of the IFTTT page. The first bar should say “Make more Applets from scratch.” Click on the “IfThisThenThat” button in that bar. Click on “This” in “If +This Then That” Search for the type of service you want to hook up — RSS for a feed, or Pocket, or Facebook, etc. and choose the type of event you want to use (ex. “New feed item” or “New item tagged…”) Enter the info needed for the event — your feed URL, the tags you’re looking for, etc, and click on “Create Trigger.” Click on “That” in “If [rss] Then +That” Sea...