Croissant simplifies social media cross-posting on iOS
It’s rare that I find a new app that immediately becomes part of my workflow, but it’s just as rare that an app as useful as Croissant comes out.
Hailing from indie developers Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy, Croissant aims to simplify the process of posting to multiple social media sites. You know what I’m talking about: in the wake of Twitter’s X-ification, many of us are dealing with a splintered social media landscape. I, personally, have been reading and posting on no less than Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky, and boy am I tired.
This came to a head last week as I was promoting the launch of my latest book and various ancillary projects like new t-shirts and a live event. Copying and pasting posts between those three sites was practically a full-time job1, especially when they included pictures with attendant alt text.
But I got a chance to try Croissant in beta last week and it absolutely saved my sanity. It supports text and images, complete with that alt text, as well as threaded posts, and lets you choose which services you want to post to each time. You can also archive drafts for later, choose post visibility on both Mastodon and Threads, and add content warnings for Mastodon.
There are some limitations, however. For example, right now, while you can insert images from your Photos library, you can’t copy and paste, which can be frustrating. There’s also no support for GIFs or videos as attachments. And it’s currently only designed for the iPhone.2 Many of those are on the app’s roadmap, according to the developers.
There are also issues that are beyond Croissant’s control: for example, tagging other accounts can work, but you won’t get autocomplete, and if a username doesn’t exist on a service it’s just going to show up as text. And ultimately it’s still only an app for posting to multiple networks, not for reading all of them in one place. But such are the vagaries of social media in 2024.
Croissant’s free to download and give a whirl, but it requires a subscription for posting to multiple services: either $2.99 per month, $19.99 annually, or $59.99 forever.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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