feat: Add Instagram support

[howardpen9]

Problem

Instagram is one of the most requested platforms for cross-posting workflows. When building automated content distribution pipelines, Instagram is a critical gap — users currently have to manually copy and paste content, which breaks the automation flow.

Use Case

• Cross-post text/carousel content from X or LinkedIn drafts to Instagram
• Schedule Instagram posts alongside other platforms in a single agent workflow
• Support for Instagram's text overlay on images, carousel posts, and story-compatible formats

Context

In our cross-posting pipeline, we support direct publishing to X, LinkedIn, and Threads via Typefully, but Instagram requires a completely manual workflow. Since Threads (Meta's platform) is already supported, Instagram integration could potentially share some of the same infrastructure.

Suggested Scope

• Instagram Feed posts (image + caption)
• Instagram Carousel posts
• Scheduling support

[m13v]

Instagram integration for cross-posting pipelines is one of those things that sounds simple but has a lot of edge cases.

the Meta Graph API route works for Business/Creator accounts but the content_publish permission approval takes weeks. and personal accounts straight up can't post via API, which catches a lot of people off guard.

for carousel posts specifically, you need to create each media item as a container first, then create a carousel container that references them, then publish. it's a three-step process per post and each step can fail independently, so you need retry logic at each stage.

one practical alternative while working on native API support: browser automation via Playwright. we use it for LinkedIn and Reddit posting in our social media pipeline. for Instagram specifically, you'd want to use the mobile web view (instagram.com in a mobile-sized viewport) since the desktop site doesn't support creating posts. the flow is: navigate to instagram.com, click the + icon, upload image, add caption, share. it's hacky but ships same-day instead of waiting for API approval.

for scheduling support, the key is keeping track of posted content in a database so you never double-post when a job retries.

[m13v]

our cross-platform social posting pipeline for reference, handles the dedup and per-platform content adaptation: https://github.com/m13v/social-autoposter/blob/main/skill/SKILL.md - and the video/media upload tooling for social platforms: https://github.com/m13v/social-media-video-upload