Overview
Social Automation is a self-hosted backend that schedules and auto-posts videos across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook from a single admin panel. The goal was full control over multi-platform publishing without renting a third-party scheduler and handing it my accounts.
How it works
A FastAPI backend handles OAuth with each platform and manages a publishing queue; a Next.js admin panel is the front end for uploading a video once and scheduling it out across platforms. YouTube and Instagram authentication go through their OAuth flows, and the system auto-detects when a vertical video should be published as a Short or Reel rather than a normal upload.
Real-world lessons
Running this in production surfaced exactly the kind of bugs you only find live. One was subtle: YouTube was intermittently disabling comments on published videos. After digging through the pipeline I traced it to YouTube's own "Made for Kids" auto-classification rather than anything in my code — a genuinely useful thing to have confirmed instead of guessing.
Another was a scheduling bug where a manual post could accidentally de-schedule a different platform's already-queued post, because of how the PENDING and SCHEDULED states interacted. Fixing it meant making the scheduler idempotent and platform-aware: a manual post to one platform must never disturb another platform's queue. Both fixes are the sort of thing that only shows up once real content is flowing through the system every day.
Status
The backend runs on Railway and is in daily use. Ongoing work is on hardening the scheduler and expanding platform coverage.