Mastodon Post Scraper

What does it do?

Mastodon Post Scraper extracts posts from any Mastodon instance using the public Mastodon API. Search by hashtags across one or multiple instances and collect post text, author information, engagement metrics (boosts, favorites, replies), timestamps, and instance data. Results are available in JSON, CSV, or Excel format.

Why use this actor?

Mastodon and the Fediverse are growing as decentralized alternatives to traditional social media. This scraper enables researchers, marketers, and analysts to monitor conversations across the Fediverse, track hashtag trends, analyze community engagement, and collect social data from any public Mastodon instance without needing an account.

How to use it

1. Go to the actor's page on the Apify platform.
2. Click Start to open the input configuration.
3. Enter one or more Mastodon instance domains (e.g., mastodon.social, fosstodon.org).
4. Enter hashtags to search for (without the # symbol).
5. Set the maximum number of posts to collect.
6. Click Start and wait for the results.
7. Download your data from the Dataset tab.

The actor uses Mastodon's public API, making it fast and reliable without browser rendering.

Input configuration

Field	Type	Description	Default
instances	array	Mastodon instance domains	["mastodon.social"]
hashtags	array	Hashtags to search (without #)	["tech", "opensource"]
maxPosts	integer	Maximum posts to collect	300
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings	Apify Proxy

Output data

Each item in the dataset contains:

{
    "author": "alice@mastodon.social",
    "authorDisplayName": "Alice Developer",
    "postText": "Just published a new open source library for...",
    "boosts": 24,
    "favorites": 87,
    "replies": 12,
    "createdAt": "2026-02-19T10:30:00.000Z",
    "url": "https://mastodon.social/@alice/123456789",
    "instance": "mastodon.social",
    "hashtag": "opensource",
    "language": "en",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-02-19T14:30:00.000Z"
}

Cost of usage

This actor uses CheerioCrawler with the Mastodon API, making it extremely lightweight. A typical run with 1 instance and 2 hashtags for 300 posts takes under 1 minute and costs less than $0.01 in platform credits. The actor is priced at $0.30 per 1,000 results with pay-per-event pricing.

Tips

• Different instances have different communities; try fosstodon.org for tech or chaos.social for European users.
• The Mastodon API returns posts in reverse chronological order, so you get the most recent posts first.
• Combine multiple instances in a single run to get a broader view of Fediverse conversations.
• Schedule runs to track hashtag trends over time.
• Some instances may rate-limit requests; start with smaller limits if scraping many instances.
• Use the language field to filter results by language in post-processing.

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Built with Crawlee and Apify SDK. See more scrapers by consummate_mandala on Apify Store.