Why not X, and why Threads waits

Post read: $0.005 per resource. Post creation: $0.015 per request — $0.200 when it carries a URL. Free public read access: none.— X API pay-per-use pricing, docs.x.com, checked July 2026

Two networks are in. Two are not — and here's the whole reasoning, because "we decided against it" is not a reason.

./blog.sh announces every published post on Mastodon or Bluesky, and the replies to that announcement become the post's comments. For that to work, the engine needs two things from a network: a way to post, and a way for a browser to read a public thread. Cheap, ideally free, forever — because a personal blog is a decades-long project with a hobby budget.

X: no

Look at that price list again. Announcing a post with a link costs real money. Loading the reply thread — which happens every time anyone scrolls to the comments — costs real money, per read, forever. On a personal blog, that's a subscription to your own comment section, billed by your readers' curiosity.

There's no engineering answer to a pricing decision. So: no.

Threads: not yet

Threads is genuinely feasible, and the design is sitting in a drawer. But look at what "feasible" means here:

Publishing and reading replies to your own posts works — server-side only, through a registered Meta developer app, with OAuth and 60-day tokens.— the Threads API docs, summarized

In practice that's a cron job refreshing tokens so they never silently expire, and comments cached into JSON with roughly a half-hour delay — instead of the live thread Mastodon and Bluesky hand any browser for free. It's all buildable. It's just a lot of standing machinery for a network nobody has asked me about yet. The day someone does, the drawer opens.

Scraping Threads: no, and firmly

The tempting shortcut — skip the API, scrape the web app — fails three ways at once. The app's internals change constantly and no community project maintains a stable interface to them. Meta blocks datacenter IPs and forbids automated collection in its terms, so shipping a scraper in a community engine means handing every user a feature that breaks without warning and can put their account at risk. And the paid scraping services fail the same test with extra steps: per-request pricing, your data flowing through a third party, and a dependency on someone else's ongoing legal cat-and-mouse.

The scoreboard

Mastodon and Bluesky are in because they pass the boring test: free to post, free for a browser to read a public thread, no tokens with expiry dates in the critical path. Any network that starts passing it is welcome. Any network that stops — well, now you know the exit criteria too.