How to schedule Mastodon posts (and when you don't need a tool)

Mastodon has a scheduler. It is just not where you would look for it. Here is how to reach it for free, and the point at which something more is worth it.

If you have gone looking for a schedule button in Mastodon and come away thinking it does not exist, you are not missing anything obvious. Mastodon can schedule posts, and the official web app cannot. Both of those are true at once, which is why this is confusing.

This guide covers where the scheduler actually lives, how to use it for free, the limits nobody mentions until you hit them, and the honest point at which a separate tool starts earning its keep.

The short answer

Scheduling is built into Mastodon's API. When something posts to your server it can pass a scheduled_at time, and your server holds the post and publishes it for you. There are API endpoints to list what you have scheduled, change a time, and cancel one.

What there is not, at time of writing, is a way to reach any of that from the official web interface or the official mobile apps. The feature is real and finished; it just has no button. So to schedule a Mastodon post you use a third-party client that exposes what the API already does.

Apps that can schedule a Mastodon post

All of these talk to your own server, so a post scheduled in any of them is held by your instance rather than by the app's company. Pick whichever suits the device you post from.

• Android — Tusky, Fedilab, Moshidon, Subway Tooter
• iPhone and iPad — Mona
• Windows and Linux desktop — Tuba
• In a browser — Phanpy, FediPlan

The flow is the same everywhere: write the post, look for a clock or calendar icon in the compose screen, pick a date and time, and send. It moves into a scheduled list you can edit or cancel until it goes out.

Some instances also add their own schedule button to the compose box. If yours does, use it — it is the same underlying feature. If you end up wanting more than one account in one place, that is what the Mastodon scheduler is for.

Four limits worth knowing before you rely on it

A scheduled post has to be at least five minutes in the future. This one catches people out constantly. If you try to schedule something for two minutes from now, the server rejects it. Round up.

Scheduled posts live on the server you created them on. If you migrate your account to a different instance later, anything you had queued does not come with you. Migration moves followers, not drafts. Before you move, either let the queue drain or write the posts down somewhere else.

The 500-character limit is a default, not a rule. Mastodon ships with 500, and plenty of instances raise it — some substantially. A post that is fine on one server can be rejected by another, which matters the moment you post to more than one. Mastodon also counts generously: every link counts as 23 characters no matter how long the URL is, and the domain part of a mention does not count at all — the full rules are here.

Your scheduled post keeps the settings you gave it. Visibility and content warnings are stored with the post, not applied at publish time. If you schedule something public that should have been followers-only, you have to cancel and rewrite it rather than change it after the fact — so check the visibility dropdown before you send, not after.

When a client is genuinely enough

I want to be straight about this, because most articles on this subject are written by scheduling companies and skip it: if you post to one Mastodon account, a few times a week, from one device, a third-party client does the whole job for free. You do not need a scheduling tool, and you should not pay for one.

"The honest test is not whether you want to schedule a post. It is whether you are trying to run a publishing routine."

When it stops being enough

The client approach breaks down in fairly specific places, and you will know when you hit them:

• You cannot see the shape of your month. A scheduled list is a list. It tells you what is queued, not whether you have three posts stacked on Tuesday and nothing for a week after.
• You are picking every time by hand. Deciding a date and time for every post is a small tax that gets heavy. What you usually want is to say "weekday mornings and Sunday evening" once, and have posts drop into the next free slot.
• You post to more than one account or server. Clients are account-shaped. Two accounts on two instances means two apps, or a lot of logging in and out.
• You are not only on Mastodon. If the same thought goes to Bluesky and Mastodon, writing it twice in two apps is the actual work, not the scheduling.
• Someone else has to approve it. Client work, a co-founder, a comms review — none of that fits a compose box.
• You want to know what worked. Mastodon deliberately keeps analytics thin. A client will not tell you which posts landed.

What a scheduling tool adds

This is the part where I am obviously not neutral, so treat it as a description rather than a pitch. A tool like PostDaily sits on the same API a client does. What it adds is the layer above a single post: a calendar you can plan a month on, a posting queue that fills itself from times you set once per channel, several accounts and several servers in one composer, per-post analytics, and a review link you can send to someone who does not have an account.

It also handles the counting properly — the same weighted rules Mastodon uses, so the editor and the server never disagree about whether a post fits — and it retries when a publish fails rather than dropping it quietly.

None of that is worth anything if your problem is "I would like this one post to go out tomorrow morning". Install Tusky.

A reasonable way to decide

Start with a client. It is free, it uses the feature Mastodon already built, and it will tell you within a fortnight whether scheduling is actually the thing you needed. If you find yourself keeping a separate list of what to post when, or opening two apps to say the same thing twice, that is the signal — and it will be obvious rather than a judgement call.

Either way, the scheduler is there. It is just hidden, and nobody tells you. And if your next question is what time to schedule for, we looked into that too — the answer is less exciting than the genre suggests.