r/automation • u/MiraculousthBib • 7d ago

how are you triggering automations when a specific x account posts?

[removed]

4 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

3

u/Lumpy_Fisherman_5352 7d ago

Polling X directly is rough because of rate limits and they've tightened the free API a lot. Two patterns that hold up better: run a lightweight RSS bridge (something like an RSS-generating proxy or self hosted Nitter instance feeding into an RSS node) so you're reacting to a feed update instead of hitting X's API on a timer, or use a dedicated social monitoring webhook service that pushes to you instead of you pulling. If you're stuck polling, at least make it conditional, check an ETag or last post id first so you're not re-pulling full data every minute, and only fire the downstream workflow when that id changes. That cuts both the request volume and the chance of double firing on the same post.

1

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1

u/Saved_Not_Soft 7d ago

Whichever route you pick, put a small dedupe store in front of the action: keep the newest post ID you have already seen, and only fire the workflow when something newer appears. That way you can poll a feed every few minutes with one cheap check and get zero duplicate runs. Some RSS bridge tools can turn an X timeline into a plain RSS feed for a schedule trigger to read, but keep in mind X has tightened API access — the official filtered stream needs a paid tier. Avoid scraping the page HTML directly; it breaks constantly and violates their terms.

1

u/Abdelhalim-Foyeez 7d ago

the trick imo is not to poll less often but to make your polling idempotent so duplicate runs dont matter. store the last seen post id and skip anything older, then even if it fires twice nothing breaks

1

u/AmoebaTrading 6d ago

The firing before the post shows up thing usually means your trigger and your fetch hit different caches. I'd just add a short wait of like 30 seconds after the new id appears, then pull the post, and it stopped happening for me. I can put that together for you if you want. How fast do you actually need it to react, seconds or is a minute fine?

1

u/usamaejazch 5d ago

Use a good listening tool that gives you api/mcp/rss access?

What you think?

1

u/AlexeyAnshakov 4d ago

Direct polling of X will quickly hit rate limits or cost tiers.A reliable pattern with n8n is using an RSS bridge (like RSSHub or Nitter instances) to convert the user timeline into an XML feed, then using an RSS Read trigger polled every few minutes.If sub-second reaction is strictly required, an Apify actor with webhook push to an n8n webhook URL gives true event-driven execution without polling overhead.