Two Accounts, One Slot

Most of us do not have one account per platform. I have a Page for the show and a Page under my own name. Two Instagram accounts. They reach different people and they carry different things.

PodGlue had exactly one slot for each. Connect a second and the first quietly went away.

The easy half

The database had a rule: one connection per platform, per person. Sensible when it was written. Wrong the moment you have a second Page.

That rule is now per destination rather than per platform, for Facebook and Instagram, which are the two where I actually hit it. Everything else keeps the old rule, because relaxing a rule everywhere it might apply is how you break the six things that were quietly relying on it. Your calendar does not need two connections.

Instagram had a second wrinkle. Its login screen reuses whatever account your browser is already signed into, so asking to add a second account would have handed back the first one, again, and the save would have failed with something unhelpful. There is a documented way to force a proper sign-in. PodGlue now uses it, but only when you already have one account connected, so the first time is still one tap.

The half I did not expect

Here is the part worth writing down.

Autopilot lets you tick which platforms should get each new episode. I ticked Facebook. Reasonable.

But "Facebook" was being read as every Facebook connection you have. With one Page that is the same sentence. With two it is not, it means the same episode goes out to both, and nothing in the settings screen ever said so.

Nothing broke. Nobody has two Pages connected yet. The feature that made two Pages possible is the feature that would have made this misfire, and they were four hours apart.

What I keep thinking about: the double-post was not introduced by the change. It was already written that way, and it was only ever correct because something else was preventing the situation. Remove the thing preventing the situation, and the latent bug is just a bug.

So the rule now: one destination per platform you tick, oldest connection wins, and if there were others it writes down which ones it skipped. That last part matters more than it sounds. A system that quietly picks one of your Pages and says nothing is a system you cannot debug when it picks the wrong one.

What I took from it

When you remove a constraint, the interesting question is not what the constraint was stopping. It is what was quietly depending on it.

The database rule looked like it was about storage. It was also, invisibly, the only thing keeping scheduling honest. Nobody wrote that down, because while it held there was nothing to notice.

Both Facebook Pages and both Instagram accounts can be connected now. Choosing which one a given post goes to is the next piece, and it is the one I am actually looking forward to, that is the part where two accounts stops being a limitation worked around and starts being the point.