Approve and schedule

Nothing publishes without a human approving it. Who clicks, and when, depends on who wrote the text and who is doing the clicking.

The rule

A permitted human's Schedule or Post now click is itself the approval, recorded in their name, whoever wrote the draft. If you have the permission to schedule content and you click it, that click is the audited review: there is no separate Approve button to find first, and it does not matter whether you wrote the draft yourself or an AI feature did.

Approval is always a human act, recorded in that human's name

It is always one of: a click in Studio (Schedule, Post now, or an explicit Approve), the mobile app's equivalent, or an elevated MCP connection whose owner explicitly consented to approving on your behalf. Nothing publishes any other way.

When there is a separate Approve step

A draft sits awaiting_approval, with an explicit Approve button, in two cases:

• It was written by AI (autopost, a research writer, a repurpose, an editorial draft) and no permitted human has clicked Schedule or Post now on it yet.
• It was scheduled by someone without approval permission (a client-role user, for example). Their scheduling does not count as approval; a permitted teammate still has to approve it.

A publication whose scheduled time arrives while its post is still unapproved expires rather than publishing. It never fires late.

Schedule

Pick the account, pick the time, adjust the caption, and Schedule. You pick:

The account. Which connected account this goes to. One draft can be scheduled to several, which is how cross-posting works.

The time. Your configured slots are offered as defaults, and you can pick any time instead. See Posting schedule.

The caption for that network. Adjusted per platform, since a 3,000 character LinkedIn post does not fit Bluesky's 300.

That creates a slot at status pending and, for a permitted human, approves the draft in the same click.

The composer checks the platform's requirements before it lets you book: caption length, media count, whether media is required, and for video the size, duration and codecs. A problem shows up here rather than failing hours later.

Post now

For a channel you want to publish to immediately rather than waiting for a slot: pick your channels and click Post now, in Studio or the mobile app. It schedules the same publications at the current time, so the next tick (within about a minute) fires them. Nothing about the pipeline changes: it is the same tick, the same connectors, the same approval-in-the-same-click.

Cross-posting

Schedule the same approved draft again, to a different account. Each booking is its own slot with its own time and caption.

The draft stays scheduled until every slot has run.

Then what

The slot waits. A scheduler ticks every minute, and when the slot is due it publishes through the platform's official API, as long as the post is approved by then.

Watch it in the Queue. If nothing goes out, its Nothing is publishing checklist covers the usual causes.

Publishing by hand

For anything Postlyra cannot post for you, write the draft as normal, post it yourself, then click Mark posted.

That records it as published without publishing anything, so it leaves your queue and metrics can match against it later.

On MCP

An MCP connection with elevated access can approve a post on your behalf (approve_post, or create_post with approve: true), but only after you explicitly consented to that on the connection's approval screen, and every approval is recorded as your own act. A standard connection can only add content to your review queue; it cannot approve anything. See MCP.