🐘 Mastodon Trends Scraper

🚀 Pull trending Mastodon posts, hashtags, and links in seconds. Built on the official Mastodon REST API used by every instance in the Fediverse.

The Mastodon Trends Scraper pulls trending content from any public Mastodon instance (mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, mas.to, hachyderm.io, and thousands more) using the official /api/v1/trends/ endpoints. It returns one structured record per trending post, hashtag, or link - with account, engagement, media, and language metadata fully parsed.

Coverage: every Mastodon-compatible instance on the Fediverse. Three trend types: statuses, tags, links. Up to 1,000,000 records per run on the paid plan.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Social listening teams	Track decentralized social conversations
Journalists & researchers	Spot emerging stories outside corporate networks
Brand monitoring	Detect mentions and trending hashtags
Open-source community	Build Fediverse analytics dashboards

📋 What the Mastodon Trends Scraper does

• Queries the official /api/v1/trends/statuses, /trends/tags, and /trends/links endpoints
• Strips HTML, extracts media, and normalizes account + engagement fields
• Works against any public Mastodon instance - no API key required
• Outputs to tabular records via Apify dataset
• Auto-limits to 10 items on the free plan; up to 1,000,000 on paid

💡 Why it matters: Mastodon's distributed nature means there's no single "trending" page. This Actor lets you collect trends from any instance, any time.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: account, favouritesCount, imageUrl, reblogsCount, results, scrapedAt, title, url. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: Each Mastodon instance manages its own trends — results from mastodon.social differ from fosstodon.org. Some smaller instances disable trends entirely.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the Mastodon Trends Scraper actor page
3. Set instance (default: mastodon.social), trendType, and maxItems
4. Click Start and wait for the run to finish
5. Open the dataset as tabular / spreadsheet / tabular / tabular

🔗 Recommended Actors

Actor	What it does
GitHub Trending Scraper	Daily trending repos
Hacker News Scraper	Top tech stories
Reddit Subreddit Scraper	Subreddit posts
Bluesky Posts Scraper	Bluesky feed

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with the Mastodon project or any specific instance. Only publicly available data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.