Mastodon Scraper: Profiles, Posts, Hashtags & Trends

Scrape Mastodon and the fediverse from any instance's public API: profiles with follower counts and bio, posts with boosts, favourites, replies, hashtags, media and link cards, hashtag timelines, and trending tags, posts and links. Opt-outs honoured. No login. From $0.30 per 1,000 posts.

A Mastodon scraper for the whole fediverse, with no account. Point it at any Mastodon (or Mastodon-compatible) server and get clean rows from the server's own public API: profiles with display name, bio, profile links (with verification), follower, following and post counts, last post date and bot/group flags; posts from accounts and hashtag timelines with text, content warning, language, favourites, boosts, replies and quotes, hashtags, mentions, media and link cards; and the server's trending hashtags, posts and links with daily and weekly usage. Filter by date, include or skip replies and boosts. Use it for brand and topic monitoring, open-source and tech community research, social listening beyond X, journalism and academic studies of the fediverse. $0.30 per 1,000 posts or trends and $1 per 1,000 profiles, with no compute bill on top; problems return a free status row instead of failing.

What data does it return?

Every run outputs clean, schema-validated rows like these:

type	handle	followersCount	text	name	authorHandle	usesToday
profile	Mastodon@mastodon.social	879015
post			#Mastodon is getting a new look in our upcoming 5.0 release…		Mastodon@mastodon.social
trend				#VendrediLecture		94

How much does it cost?

Transparent pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you get, and the actor always respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and it stops cleanly at the cap instead of overrunning.

Event	Price	Charged	Worked example
post	$0.0003	per post row	1,000 posts = $0.30
profile	$0.001	per profile row	100 profiles = $0.10
trend	$0.0003	per trending hashtag or link row	20 trends = $0.006
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	per run per GB of memory (platform start fee)	One run at 256 MB = $0.00005

Input options

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
instance	string	no	"mastodon.social"	Mastodon server used for hashtags, trends and bare usernames, e.g. mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, mstdn.social. Accounts written as @user@server are read from their own server.
accounts	array	no	—	Accounts as @user@server, user@server or profile URLs (https://server/@user). Returns the profile and its latest posts.
hashtags	array	no	—	Hashtags (with or without #) whose public timeline on the instance you want, e.g. opensource, photography, rust.
trends	array	no	—	Optional: the instance's trending hashtags, posts and/or links.
maxPostsPerSource	integer	no	40	Newest posts to return per account and per hashtag. 0 returns profiles only.
includeReplies	boolean	no	false	Also return replies.
includeBoosts	boolean	no	false	Also return posts the account boosted (marked isBoost, with boostedBy).
postedAfter	string	no	—	Optional date (YYYY-MM-DD). Paging stops at the first older post.
maxItems	integer	no	1000	Upper limit on rows for the whole run.

Limits & honest notes

• Responsible use: posts and profiles are personal content. Follow each server's rules and data-protection law (GDPR/UK GDPR), use the data for research, monitoring and analytics, and never for spam or harassment. This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Mastodon gGmbH or any server.
• Consent is honoured: accounts that set noindex (asked not to be indexed) or did not opt in to searchable posts (indexable: false) are skipped together with their posts, and only public posts are returned. E-mail addresses and phone numbers are removed from bios and profile fields.
• It reads only each server's public REST API, checks robots.txt on every server, waits at least 1 s between requests per server and sends an honest user agent (ActorForge-Mastodon). There is no login, no cookies and no proxies. Requests to private or internal network addresses are refused.
• Some servers require a login for hashtag timelines or trends; those sources return a free status row and the run continues. Respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and the run stops cleanly at the cap.

Related ActorForge actors

• Bluesky Profile Scraper — the same for Bluesky accounts
• Dev Community Mentions — keyword mentions across developer communities

Changelog

• 2026-10-23 — Initial release: profiles, account posts, hashtag timelines, trending hashtags, posts and links on any instance; replies, boosts and date filters; noindex/indexable opt-outs honoured; free status rows.

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Built and maintained by ActorForge. Reliability first: every actor in the portfolio is monitored by an automated nightly self-test, and breakages are typically fixed the same day.