Partial success as the default outcome of a cross-post
The cost of posting is not the typing, it is opening three apps designed to keep you there. Send one Telegram message and have it fan out to Bluesky, Farcaster and X.
Three platforms, three auth models that share nothing: an app password for Bluesky, an authorization header for Farcaster, OAuth for X. Images are worse, Farcaster needs the image hosted first, so the bot uploads to Imgur and embeds the URL, adding a dependency that fails on its own.
The decision that makes it usable is that posting is independent. A failure on one platform does not roll back the others, and the bot reports which succeeded rather than pretending the operation was atomic. Atomic cross-posting across three uncoordinated APIs is not achievable, and implementations that pretend otherwise either fail everything on one hiccup or misreport what happened. Backoff is per platform for the same reason.
The 36-second window binding a following image to its preceding text is a hack and it works, because Telegram sends them as unrelated messages and proximity is the only available signal.