Artyom Rabzonov

Posted on May 19 • Originally published at automatelab.tech

Launching content-distribution-mcp: one finished post, eight channels

#mcp #python #opensource #automation

We just shipped content-distribution-mcp: an MCP server that takes one finished post and routes it to eight developer-facing channels.

It makes zero LLM calls. Adapter I/O only. Whatever model your MCP host runs is the model that writes the per-channel copy — Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, a local Llama, or none at all if you bring your own text.

pip install content-distribution-mcp

Why we built this

Posting one blog article to DEV.to, Hashnode, GitHub Discussions, Bluesky, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium is roughly 90 minutes of paste-and-fiddle per release. We were doing that by hand. So we wrote an MCP that handles the I/O: auth, idempotency, scheduling, retries, the Reddit anti-spam gate, and the manual-channel browser pre-fill.

What's in the box

Eight MCP tools — and that is the full surface:

Tool	Purpose
`publish`	Immediate publish; idempotent on `(content.id, variant.channel)`
`schedule`	Queue variants for a future `schedule_at`
`drain`	Fire any due scheduled posts
`status`	Per-variant state for a content piece
`unpublish`	Best-effort delete (DEV.to / GitHub Discussions only)
`hints`	Static per-channel metadata (char limits, tags, canonical-URL support)
`list_profiles`	Configured Distribution Profiles
`list_subreddits`	Curated Subreddit Catalog entries

Eight channels, three tiers

Channel	Tier	Notes
DEV.to	Auto	Forem API, native `canonical_url`
Hashnode	Auto	GraphQL, native `originalArticleURL`
GitHub Discussions	Auto	Per-repo GraphQL, footer for canonical
Bluesky	Auto	atproto SDK, canonical appended to post text
Reddit	Auto-gated	Per-subreddit cooldown, 5/day global cap, self-promo ratio
Medium	Manual	Playwright pre-fill + mark-live CLI
LinkedIn	Manual	Personal + company-admin compose, plain-text draft
Twitter / X	Manual	Free-tier API unusable; compose URL + plain-text draft

The three manual channels exist because their APIs are either gone (Twitter free tier), paid-tier (LinkedIn Marketing API), or never existed (Medium). The MCP opens a pre-filled compose tab and the operator clicks Submit. Less elegant, still beats the manual copy/paste workflow.

The Reddit gate

Reddit punishes anyone who treats it like a content pipe. The adapter enforces four rules before posting:

Per-subreddit cooldown — the last live post-log entry for that sub
5-per-day global cap — over the operator's full Reddit history with this MCP
Self-promo ratio — over the last 30 posts in that subreddit, your own-domain links must stay under the curated max_self_link_pct
Account age + karma — against minimums in the curated Subreddit Catalog

If any rule fails, publish returns state=failed with the specific reason. No bypass flag. If you want to post anyway, write a new entry in the Subreddit Catalog.

YAML or Notion: pick one

Two backends implement the same StateBackend Protocol:

YamlBackend — four YAML files under ~/.distribution-mcp/. Zero config; right for solo/local use.
NotionBackend — three Notion databases (Distribution Profiles, Subreddit Catalog, Post Log). Right for team/agency use; operators can audit the queue in Notion's UI.

You swap them with a single constructor argument. No caller code changes.

Works with any MCP host

The server speaks standard MCP (stdio or SSE) and has zero Anthropic-specific code:

grep -ri "anthropic" src/  # returns nothing

Tested with Claude Code, Cursor, n8n's MCP Client node, and the plain mcp Python client. If your host can talk MCP, it can talk to this.

Install

pip install content-distribution-mcp

# optional extras
pip install "content-distribution-mcp[browser]"
pip install "content-distribution-mcp[bluesky]"
playwright install chromium  # only if you use the browser channels

Then wire into your MCP host config:

// .claude/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "content-distribution": {
      "command": "content-distribution-mcp",
      "args": ["serve"]
    }
  }
}

How we use it ourselves

This very post is the dogfood. The Ghost blog post is the canonical: https://automatelab.tech/content-distribution-mcp/. The DEV.to article you're reading came out of the same publish tool with a devto:main variant. Bluesky was the second auto-channel. The browser-tier channels (LinkedIn / Twitter / Reddit) got their compose tabs pre-filled by the same MCP run.

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