On The Jetpack Social Plugin

Jetpack is a plugin that has been tied to WordPress for a very long time. It’s got a bit of everything in it. I personally use Jetpack to see website stats, like how many people have viewed our website, and to see which articles are popular. However, the other big thing I use Jetpack for is Jetpack Social.

Jetpack Social allows you to post to different platforms whenever you make a new post. This plugin would post to Facebook and Tumblr, and can also post to Linkedin as well. It used to post to Twitter as well, but that stopped working since, well, Twitter got all musky. I’ve used Jetpack Social for years and years, and it just does the job automatically. Posting to both Facebook and Tumblr is a good way to widen our reach, even if we only really get a few views from each of them.

So yeah, Jetpack Social is really useful.

Except, well, now it’s a load of crap.

Unfortunately, Jetpack has decided to make Jetpack Social a premium feature. And it does so in a really shitty way. You get a limited number of free shares to social media. But each social media platform costs one share. The default you get 30 free shares. However, it considers Facebook and Tumblr to be separate shares, meaning that one article uses up two free shares. That’s only 15 days of free shares to social media. You’d think at least they’d make it per post rather than per share, but no, these guys are penny-pinching bastards.

They took a useful feature, made it worse and then force you to pay if you need more shares. It’s a bunch of bollocks.

For a while, I did manage to circumnavigate the problem. I just needed to not update the Jetpack plugin, and it would let me continue to use Jetpack Social how I’ve been using it for years. Except, without my permission, the plugin decided to automatically update itself. And at the same time, it broke Jetpack Social completely, before returning to nagging me about getting premium. I didn’t say that the plugin could update itself, I didn’t give it permission to auto-update, but it did, and that really pisses me off.

The bigger problem though is that I can’t really find a good alternative. Jetpack would do all the complicated stuff for me, and I could just leave it to work on its own. A lot of other plugins that auto-publish to social media require me to make a bunch of applications and get APIs and do all sorts of stuff. Not only is it complicated, but I can’t get half of them to even work. Tumblr in particular wouldn’t let me access the various keys I needed despite me following their instructions to the letter.

So what am I doing now? Well, I’m publishing them by hand. Whenever an article is published here, I grab the link and post it on Facebook and Tumblr. It doesn’t look as good as how Jetpack Social had it set up, but at least it bloody works. And, more importantly, it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg, or confuse me with all sorts of weird payment plans. Frankly, Jetpack plugins are pretty damn expensive, and they’re only available as subscriptions.

For now, posting by hand is fine. I just need to dig out the login details so I can post to Twitter as well. But then again, that’s been broken for ages, so maybe I just won’t bother. Twitter is a bunch of shit anyway.