Core concepts

Post lifecycle

Every post carries a status. It's a small, predictable state machine — and understanding it is the key to knowing what has and hasn't reached your feeds.

The four statuses

StatusMeaning
draftSaved but not sent. No network has seen it.
scheduledQueued for a future schedule_at. The publisher will pick it up.
publishingTransient — the fan-out is running right now.
publishedThe fan-out has completed. Every target was attempted; check per-network results for actual delivery.

How a post moves

draftpublishingpublished— publish now
scheduledpublishingpublished— at schedule_at, via the queue

When you create a post without schedule_at, it publishes immediately and comes back published. With schedule_at, it comes back scheduled and the queue publishes it at the right time. A draft or a scheduled post can be removed before it ships with Delete or cancel a post.

Per-network outcomes

A post targets many networks, and each one succeeds or fails on its own. Internally, PostMyIsh records the outcome of every network individually — the platform post id on success, or the error on failure. So a post can be partially delivered: published overall, yet failed on one network.

published ≠ delivered everywhere

The published status means the fan-out ran, not that every network accepted the post. The dashboard shows the per-network breakdown today; exposing it over the API is on the roadmap. See Handle partial failures.

The post object

Every read returns the same shape. Timestamps are Unix milliseconds; reach and engagement_rate start at 0 and grow only as networks report.

FieldNotes
statusdraft · scheduled · publishing · published
scheduled_atWhen it will publish (ms), or null
published_atWhen it published (ms), or null
reachReported reach; starts at 0
engagement_rateReported engagement %; starts at 0

The full field list is documented on Get a post.

Confirming a publish

For a scheduled post, poll Get a post and wait for status to become published and published_at to be set. Because the queue runs every minute, a post publishes within roughly a minute of its scheduled time.