How to Announce GitHub Releases on Mastodon and Bluesky

Your releases already have a feed

Every public GitHub repository publishes an Atom feed of its releases at github.com/OWNER/REPO/releases.atom. Swap in your account and repository name and you have a list of every release, with its notes and link, that any feed reader can use.

Turn releases into drafts

In SocialMate, open RSS import, paste the releases feed and fetch it. Pick the new release and import it. It becomes a draft with the release title, the start of its notes and the link.

Then rewrite it for people, not for the changelog.

Write the announcement

Release notes are written for people already using the project. The announcement is for everyone else, so lead with what changed for them:

On Mastodon, add a couple of relevant hashtags, like the language and the project name. Many Mastodon posts can only be found through hashtags, so they are how people discover you.

Post to Mastodon and Bluesky together

Much of the open source crowd reads Mastodon and Bluesky now. SocialMate posts to any Mastodon instance and to Bluesky at once, and to your project's Discord channel through its bot. LinkedIn, Telegram and X are there too; X needs the Pro plan.

Threads for big releases

A major release deserves more than one post. Write the highlights as a thread, and SocialMate posts each part as a reply to the one before on Mastodon, Bluesky and X when you post it right away. The free thread splitter breaks long notes into parts that fit each platform's limit.

Community calls

If your project runs community calls, schedule the reminder a few days ahead and again an hour before. The free Discord timestamp generator makes a time that shows in every contributor's own time zone.

See how SocialMate works for open source maintainers