Mastodon Scraper

Scrape posts, hashtags, public timelines, and account profiles from any Mastodon instance — fast, structured, and auth-free. Built on the official public Mastodon API v1 (ActivityPub / fediverse), so it works on mastodon.social or any other decentralized server.

What it does

Mastodon Scraper turns the public Mastodon REST API into clean, flat dataset rows you can export to JSON, CSV, or Excel. Point it at any instance, pick a mode, and collect data from the fediverse without logging in.

Four modes:

• Hashtag posts — every public post tagged with a given hashtag.
• Public timeline — the instance's live public feed, local-only or full federated.
• Account posts — all posts from a specific user's profile.
• Account info — metadata for a single profile (followers, post count, bio).

Features

• Works on any Mastodon instance — just change the instance input.
• No authentication, no cookies, no tokens — pure public API reads.
• Flattened output — clean columns, not raw nested JSON blobs.
• Automatic max_id pagination with a maxItems cap.
• Optional filters: media-only posts and reply exclusion.
• Polite request pacing plus automatic retries on transient HTTP errors.
• Pay-per-result pricing friendly (PPE item-scraped events).

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	enum	hashtag_posts, public_timeline, account_posts, or account_info.
instance	string	Mastodon host, e.g. mastodon.social (default).
hashtag	string	Hashtag to scrape (with or without #). Required for hashtag_posts.
account	string	Handle username or username@instance.tld. Required for account modes.
local	boolean	Public timeline only: local instance (true) or federated (false).
onlyMedia	boolean	Collect only posts that contain an image or video.
excludeReplies	boolean	Account posts: skip replies to other users.
maxItems	integer	Max rows to collect (default 1000).

Example input

{
  "mode": "hashtag_posts",
  "instance": "mastodon.social",
  "hashtag": "technology",
  "onlyMedia": false,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Output example

Each post becomes one flat row:

{
  "id": "112233445566778899",
  "url": "https://mastodon.social/@dev_user/112233445566778899",
  "createdAt": "2026-06-20T14:03:11.000Z",
  "language": "en",
  "content": "Open-source project just hit 1.0 🎉",
  "authorUsername": "dev_user",
  "authorDisplayName": "Dev User",
  "authorUrl": "https://mastodon.social/@dev_user",
  "authorFollowers": 5120,
  "repliesCount": 12,
  "reblogsCount": 87,
  "favouritesCount": 214,
  "mediaUrls": ["https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/.../original.png"],
  "hashtags": ["technology", "opensource"],
  "isReblog": false,
  "rebloggedBy": null,
  "inReplyToId": null
}

The account_info mode produces its own flat schema (followers, following, statuses count, bio, created date, etc.).

Use cases

• Brand monitoring — track mentions of your product or company across the fediverse via hashtag mode.
• OSINT & research — monitor public discussion and sentiment on decentralized platforms.
• Journalism — follow emerging stories and trending hashtags on Mastodon.
• AI / ML training data — collect open social text at scale from a permissive, open protocol.

Why this actor

Mastodon exposes a stable, official public REST API backed by ActivityPub. This scraper talks to that API directly instead of fragile HTML parsing, so it keeps working through UI changes and runs against any Mastodon server in the fediverse. No login, no rate-limit gymnastics, no brittle selectors — just structured decentralized social data.

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Keywords: Mastodon scraper, Mastodon API, scrape Mastodon, ActivityPub, fediverse data, decentralized social, Mastodon posts, hashtag scraper, federated Twitter alternative, brand monitoring.