You can’t schedule posts on Mastodon’s desktop site. Now this isn’t a situation like with BlueSky where the feature hasn’t been built. Mastodon fully supports the ability to schedule posts, all the code and infrastructure is in place to do it. You can even do it right now it via the Mastodon mobile app. The desktop website just straight up does not have the button to actually schedule a post for whatever reason.

This is a pretty crucial feature, as a lot of organizations, artists, and social media figures rely on being able to time their posts right to maximize engagement. Even as an average person, the feature’s really nice for being able to import over a backlog of stuff without flooding everyone’s timeline all at once or having to go out of my way to remember to post every single day.

Scheduling makes this a lot easier, and it’s one of the key features Twitter continues to have over the competition. I’m not the only one who sees it as a big deal as there’s also been an entire long-standing GitHub thread dedicated to debating this exact issue. Yes, debating. Because turns out, there were some people who did not want this feature at all, saying it was better suited for a third party app.

Which, sure, some scheduling third-party apps do exist: FediPlan and scheduler.mastodon.tools are the two main ones. Both of these have their issues though: scheduler.mastodon.toots doesn’t support a bunch of post types (polls, images, etc) and FediPlan is just straight up non-functional right now.

Eventually, the debate gets resolved and scheduling does get implemented into Mastodon around 2021. Yes, it exists. On the back-end. There is no direct way to schedule Tweets from the interface of the Mastodon website.

So, then we watch as a brand new GitHub issue is opened to debate the merits of having this already-implemented feature on the Mastodon interface. This is absolutely insane.

They say when deciding whether to include or cut a feature, you should consider how it would fit with the purpose of the system as a whole: well, even from that lens, it doesn’t make sense to not include it. Mastodon is not minimal, Mastodon is meant to replace Twitter. As is, it’s already a Ruby on Rails monster which consumes enough resources to throttle the most low end server hosting options. But unlike more lightweight, minimalist solutions such as Pleroma, Mastodon is more feature-rich. Because it is designed to replace Twitter.

The most valuable posters on Twitter, the kinds of people bringing in fresh content to promote, make heavy use of this feature. You need the functionality to be easily accessible and reliable. Leaving it to the API is not at all intuitive and creates all sorts of issues with consistency and reliability. The average person should not have to hunt down a third party app and weigh its pros and cons while also dealing with external reliability issues for these respective services. That’s how you burn people out on the platform as a whole. So, what has become of the post-scheduling feature on Mastodon? Some good news has happened within the past week: a user within the thread (@Silverbut) has taken upon the work of adding this feature onto the posting interface. Not even a senior developer. He’s made an impressive amount of progress too. This is a feature which might actually be implemented soon, depending on both how it goes for him and whether or not the PR gets accepted.

If we get lucky, maybe we’ll finally be able to schedule posts soon! It would be a good sign of things to come for the platform. But, until then, this thread is going to be the closest thing we get to an answer.