A post's journey

This page follows one single post from the moment it exists on Instagram until it goes out on Mastodon. If you are going to read only one page of this documentation, make it this one: the rest explains the pieces that appear named here.

The whole trip

The bytes are downloaded at step 4, not when publishing. If they were downloaded at publish time, a post approved today and emitted tomorrow could meet an expired URL — and it would fail at the worst moment, already approved by a person who believed it was settled.

Where a person decides

The system has exactly three points where a human decision is mandatory, and none of them can be skipped from the interface.

All three are personal, dated assertions: who granted the permission, who approved the emission, who decided a route may go out by itself. None of them can be granted in bulk from an import — see Cauce.

The states of an emission

An emission is “this item, towards this account”. Its state is what the “To approve” screen and the history read.

bloqueada_derechos is a state of its own and not an error. If it shared a state with fallida, the automatic retry would pick it up over and over — and an error counter that climbs because a guard is working teaches people to ignore errors.

What happens when something breaks

A rate-limit pause is painted as a normal state, not as a failure. It is what the network answers when you ask too often, and it happens every day. With a red ✗, the panel would be red almost all the time and red would stop meaning anything.