Welcome to Xrosspost.com, a tool for easily crossposting tweets from Xitter to Bluesky. This is convenient for folks who want to migrate from Xitter to Bluesky, yet still sometimes need to show others some choice toxic tweets, yet without the user actually going to Xitter and supporting ads on that system.
Xrosspost.com also works for Threads as well, which is nice since Threads has recently gone fully toxic, too.
Normally if you add a URL of a Tweet (e.g. https://x.com/skibuSmith/status/1861280658573725949) to a Bluesky post the viewers will just see the ugly URL and not an image of the actual tweet. This is because Space Karen Leon Musk broke Twitter intentionally to try to keep users on the hellsite by making crossposts problematic. Some people have resorted to taking screen shots of a tweet and posting that image. That of course is a nuisance. Plus one then doesn't provide a link back to the original Tweet to show that it really was posted and is not just some photoshopped image.
Xrosspost.com simply makes it nice and easy to crosspost Tweet images on Bluesky (and Threads too)
You can get the link for a Tweet by clicking on its adjacent share button on the lower right side of the Tweet and clicking on "Copy link". Then in Bluesky start to create a new Bluesky post and past in the URL (e.g. https://x.com/skibuSmith/status/1861280658573725949). Bluesky will automatically create the ugly version of the link. No problem! Delete the ugly link by clicking on the "X" delete button. Then edit the link so that instead of referring to "x.com" it instead points to "xrosspost.com" just by adding the characters "rosspost" in the right place. The new image version of the crosspost will then appear. If the image for the post isn't automatically generated then move the pointer to the end of the URL and add a space. This should nudge Bluesky into generating the image. Then finish up your Bluesky post and you are all done.
For those who want to know how this all works behind the scenes...
The Post2Image GitHub repository is here
post2image takes in a URL for a social media post and returns an Open Graph card that points to an image of the post.
The main goal is to make it easy to repost or quote post a Xitter post (but also threads and possibly others) onto Bluesky and have it look like a the full original post. This would be simpler than having to take a screenshot of the original post and then post it.
And importantly, currently Xitter doesn't provide any reasonable image of the post if one just uses the original URL on Bluesky. Yes, something else broken by Space Karen.
Idea was to have a domain name similar to x.com, like xrosspost.com so that one can easily change x.com to the new name. When a user wants to repost a tweet to Bluesky they get the URL for the tweet, like https://x.com/outbreakupdates/status/1871187575500841435, and then post it to Bluesky as https://fixedx.com/outbreakupdates/status/1871187575500841435 .
Bluesky will access the link in order to get the Open Graph card info that contains a description of the link. The xrosspost.com site is running the post2image python web server. It will handle the Open Graph card request from Bluesky and generate an image of the original Tweet. post2image determines the post type (Xitter, Threads, or Bluesky) and uses the appropriate social media site to convert the post into simple html. Then post2image passes the simple html to a headless web browser (Chromium) which renders the html, including he usual complicated tjavascript, iframes, and css, and takes a virtual screenshot to obtain a fully rendered png image for the post. The image is stored and made available via a URL. Then post2image returns a html page that contains the Open Graph card info, including a link to the newly created image of the tweet.
Bluesky, or other social media system that made the https://xrosspost.com/ request, takes the Open Graph card info and incorporates into the post being created.
Caching of the tweet info is of course done.
It is fully working at xrosspost.com , though will need to address any problems that users note.
Nah, this all works by using important functionality, like embeding tweets, that can't be turned off. So even if Space Karen finds out about this, tough beans!
Install chromedriver, which allows selenium to actually communicate with the browser.
sudo apt install chromium-chromedriver
Download code from github:
git clone https://github.com/skibu/post2image.git
Need to load in certain python libraries first.
# Because of version complications when loading Pillow might
# need to first get proper version of libijpeg62 libs
sudo apt install libjpeg62-turbo=1:2.0.6-4
sudo apt install libjpeg62-turbo-dev=1:2.0.6-4
# Note that running pip via python3 to make sure using proper version
# Image processing is done using Pillow (aka PIL)
python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow
# For more easily handling http requests
python3 -m pip install requests
# Using selenium to run headless browser that converts html to image
# Note that running pip via python3 to make sure using proper version
python3 -m pip install --upgrade selenium
First, from home directory, get the application from github: git clone https://github.com/skibu/post2image.git
Then run it via either: python3 post2image/main.py or post2image/main.py
Important consideration is to have the application start automatically at bootup. If using a Raspberry Pi one can simply modify the /etc/rc.local and add:
# Start post2image, as user pi instead of root.
# Note, when running the app, need to first cd into ones post2image
# directory so that the config data file and the image and cache
# directories can be found
sudo -H -u pi bash -c 'cd /home/pi/post2image/; /usr/bin/python3 main.py' &