What each platform accepts
Four platforms, four sets of rules. yellit does not paper over the differences — it enforces them before a publish starts, so a post fails while you can still fix it rather than halfway through.
| Platform | What you can post | Visibility |
|---|---|---|
| TikTok | One video per post, uploaded directly from your machine. | Public or private, chosen before you publish. |
| A single image, a carousel of 2–10, or a Reel. | Public. | |
| YouTube | One video, as a normal upload or a Short. | Public, unlisted, or private. |
| X | Text on its own, or up to four images, or one video. | Follows your account's setting. |
Where your media has to live
This is the difference that surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly: the platforms disagree about who fetches the file, and it is not interchangeable.
- Instagram fetches media itself, from a public HTTPS URL. A file on your own machine cannot be handed to it directly.
- YouTube, X and TikTok take an upload from us. There is no remote-URL ingest to point them at.
When you publish a local file to Instagram, yellit briefly stages it in our
own storage so Meta can fetch it, then deletes the object as soon as the
post has been created. From the command line that step is an explicit
--upload flag rather than something applied silently, because
making your file publicly fetchable for a few seconds is a real consequence
and you should be the one choosing it.
Visibility
You choose who can see a post before it goes out, on the publish page or
with --privacy. yellit asks each platform which levels your
account is actually permitted to use and never sends one it is not — and if
the level you asked for is unavailable, the post is placed at the closest
permitted one and the result says so, rather than reporting a plain success
for something nobody can see.
Two platform rules sit behind that, and neither is ours to waive. TikTok has no unlisted level, so it treats unlisted as private. And until a TikTok or YouTube integration has passed that platform's own audit, uploads through it can be forced private regardless of what was requested — yellit shows a warning saying so instead of hiding it.
Costs you should know about
X charges per post — roughly $0.015, rising to about $0.20 if your text
contains a link. yellit will not quietly spend the higher amount: a post
with a link needs --allow-link-cost before it will go out.
Which permissions this needs · Publishing from the command line