Agent-run social media for a one-person Etsy shop: what 205 views taught me

I run two tiny things on my own. THEC1LAB is a print shop on Etsy: posters drawn in code, gold on black. IAMC/TECH is my tech page: homelab field notes, tips, AI tools. So over the last few weeks I've had agents on my homelab run the social side, and I just approve or veto.

Two brands, kept apart on purpose

Early on I saw one combined intro covering all my pages and it looked wrong. They're different brands with different people buying. So the rule is simple: no Etsy CTAs on @iamc_tech, no homelab tips on the shop pages. Each brand has its own intro, its own colours, its own sign-off.

It still bit me twice. A planets post on the shop account got tech hashtags. And the tech page's "what's inside" reels wanted to end on a THEC1LAB poster card, which had to be stripped.

Each channel and how it's fed

TikTok. My TikTok is a personal account. Switching to business wanted Companies House details and I'm a sole trader. Posting through the API from an unaudited app gets forced to SELF_ONLY, which means only I can see it. Cookie bots were off the table because of shadowban risk. So the agent sends each video as an inbox draft, drops it in Discord at 17:30, and I add a sound and post it myself. Sound matters: early on a video with a commercial sound and a question caption got 389 views, a silent shop drop got 0.

Instagram. Posting to my own account through the API is allowed here, so it's fully automated. Every post gets previewed in Discord about an hour before it goes out and I can ❌ it. The agent also re-weights the mix every week from insights.

YouTube Shorts. I set the channel up on 8 Oct, uploaded one Short, and then nothing. Turns out the daily uploader was never actually built. That first Short got 1,019 views and 15 likes, better than any single TikTok I've done. The uploader went in on 10 Oct: it takes the day's approved video, fixes the loudness, uploads it and checks it really came out public.

Pinterest. This one's about links. On 10 Oct my 138 active Etsy listings had 205 views ever and 1 favourite, while TikTok videos do 200 to 740 views each. The problem is the bridge: a personal TikTok gets no clickable bio link until 1,000 followers. Pins are links. So every week a script makes fresh pins (2 a day, one per listing, words only from the listing itself) and writes a bulk CSV. I upload it by hand. Pinterest's API trial access only makes pins visible to you, and I turned down using my own cookie to automate it.

Threads. The tech page's Threads is for quick tech and AI news: one Hacker News story, why it matters, a clickable source link, under 500 characters. Since 8 Oct one slot a day shares my own dev.to posts, because I don't self-promote enough.

Scripts gather facts, models never do

This is the rule that holds the whole thing together. The model can write a caption or a joke. It does not get to invent a number.

So the moon distances, binary puzzles and "which part is this" answers are all computed by code from a fact bank. Tech facts carry a source and a verbatim quote. Then validators check the output: numbers and names only from the cited facts, no hype words, no "closest" or "only" unless the fact text says so. In testing it caught a made-up 360,000 km, a stray London and a model typing "Manches... nah let me try again" into a caption.

There's also a small decision model that scores captions. Genuine questions came back as supported at 0.81 to 0.95. A made-up claim scored 0.05. "Comment YES and tag 3 friends" scored 0.97 for bait.

The jokes on the tech page work the same way. The comic writer gives up to six fresh jokes a day, filters throw out anything with digits or a reused punchline, and then the judge asks "would most people smile". I added the judge because the first fresh jokes passed every check and still weren't funny. One example: a foreign-key joke scored 0.81, a flat one 0.13. Anything under 0.6 falls back to a fixed list. Since 10 Oct the shop's talking-Moon banter gets a fresh judged joke every day too, so it doesn't run out.

And on top of all that, my ✅ and ❌ in Discord. The agents do the day-to-day running. I keep the veto.

The honest numbers

As of 10 Oct:

• Etsy: 138 active listings, 205 views ever, 1 favourite.
• TikTok: 200 to 740 views a video. The anatomy smartphone one did 716.
• YouTube: one Short, 1,019 views, 15 likes. Uploader built 10 Oct.
• Instagram shop account: carousels have failed 6 of 7 times since 7 Oct 16:00 with "Action is blocked". Quota use was 1 out of 100 and reels went straight through, so it's an account-level spam flag, not volume. Reels and stories still publish daily.

Also, the comment agent has never seen a single comment on either Instagram account. The Meta app is still in Development mode, which only shows comments from people with a role on the app. Strangers are invisible until I switch it to Live.

The bug that hid in plain sight

The worst one was audio. The reel mixer was built for silent videos. So it only kept the music, loudness-normalised it to -14 LUFS, and silently dropped the talking-Moon voices. Every banter reel went to Instagram as full-volume music with the characters miming. I only caught it because the music sounded too loud.

For the tech page it's now voice at -16 LUFS with music at -30 underneath. The shop account kept the old mix for now. On the TikTok side the banter originals still come out at about -36 LUFS, which is very quiet, and that's not fixed yet.

What didn't work

Cookie bots. I tried a headless browser with my own Etsy cookies to send buyer messages. The first page loaded, the second got a 403: "Access is temporarily restricted … automated (bot) activity on your network". That's my home connection, so it could hit my normal browsing too. Stopped there, nothing sent. Same answer for TikTok and Pinterest cookies: not worth the ban.

Engagement bots. I asked for something to follow and like for traction on Instagram. The answer was no: it breaks Meta's terms, and the API can't do it anyway. Better content and fast replies instead.

£1 drops. Cheap limited drops on TikTok didn't work, so they've stopped.

What's next

The talking-Moon banter shorts are the content model now, and from 16 Oct they start promoting other products in the shop, not just one.

The real test is Pinterest. The first shop pin was scheduled for 11 Oct, and around 22 Oct I'll check Etsy's traffic sources to see if pins actually send anyone. The evidence for Pinterest driving Etsy printable traffic is anecdotal, so I'm not counting on it.

If you've run a small shop off a personal TikTok, what actually got people from a video to your listing before you hit 1,000 followers?

🤖 Drafted with AI assistance from my own homelab notes, logs and repos, then reviewed and edited before publishing.