Mastodon Posts Scraper - Hashtags, Accounts, Timelines

Scrape public Mastodon posts from any instance via the official REST API: hashtag timelines, account statuses and the public/local timeline, with text, engagement counts, tags, media and author stats. Since-date for incremental monitoring. No login, no proxy.

What does this Actor do?

Mastodon and the wider fediverse host millions of developers, journalists, scientists and open-source communities who left X/Twitter. Every Mastodon server exposes a public REST API, and this Actor uses it to collect public posts from hashtag timelines, specific accounts and the public timeline - with clean text, engagement counts, hashtags, mentions, media and author stats. No account, token or browser is needed.

Key features:

• Plain HTTP against official public endpoints - no browser, no proxy, no login, runs on 128 MB memory.
• Pay only for results: one charge per row saved; your maximum charge per run is always respected.
• maxItems hard cap (default 100) and bounded pagination - runs can never loop forever.
• Incremental mode via a since-date so scheduled runs only fetch new data.
• Polite rate limiting, retries with exponential backoff and Retry-After support.
• Clean, flat, consistently named JSON fields ready for Excel, Google Sheets, BigQuery or your API.

Who is it for?

• Brand and keyword monitoring - follow hashtags about your product, open-source project or industry.
• Developer relations - see what the tech crowd on fosstodon.org, hachyderm.io or infosec.exchange is saying.
• Academic research - collect public posts for discourse and network analysis.
• Lead discovery - find active accounts posting about a topic and their follower counts.
• Cross-posting archives - back up your own account's public posts.

How it works

Each source is paged with Mastodon's max_id cursor, 40 posts per request. Requests are spaced by delayMs (1 s default, well under the 300 requests per 5 minutes per-IP limit) and retried on 429/5xx honouring Retry-After. Posts are deduplicated across sources. With sinceDate, pagination stops as soon as older posts appear, so scheduled runs only fetch what is new.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
instance	string	"mastodon.social"	Mastodon server domain, e.g. mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, hachyderm.io.
hashtags	array	-	Without # (e.g. opensource).
accounts	array	[]	user, user@instance or profile URL.
searchQueries	array	[]	Full-text status search only works where the instance allows anonymous search; single words fall back to the hashtag timeline.
includePublicTimeline	boolean	false	Also scrape the federated (or local) public timeline.
localOnly	boolean	false	Restrict tag/public timelines to posts from this instance.
maxItems	integer	100	Hard cap on posts saved and charged.
maxItemsPerSource	integer	0	0 = no per-source cap.
sinceDate	string	-	ISO date/time; pagination stops once older posts appear.
excludeReplies	boolean	false	Exclude replies
excludeReblogs	boolean	true	Exclude boosts
language	string	""	ISO 639-1 code filter, e.g. en. Empty = all.
delayMs	integer	1000	Mastodon default limit is 300 req / 5 min per IP.

Example input

{
  "instance": "fosstodon.org",
  "hashtags": [
    "rust",
    "selfhosted"
  ],
  "accounts": [
    "Gargron@mastodon.social"
  ],
  "maxItems": 300,
  "sinceDate": "2026-10-20",
  "excludeReblogs": true
}

Output

Each result is one row in the default dataset. You can download it as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or read it through the Apify API. A real row from a test run on 26 October 2026:

{
  "postId": "117503344276979464",
  "url": "https://mastodon.social/@inautilo/117503344276979464",
  "source": "tag:opensource",
  "instance": "mastodon.social",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-25T20:05:44.469Z",
  "content": "#Development #Satires\nThat’s what I call technical debt · 15 hits about unpaid maintainers and overconfident AI agents https://ilo.im/16gxw7\n_____\n#Maintenance #OpenSource #AI #TechDebt #DevOps #WebDev #Frontend #Backend",
  "spoilerText": null,
  "language": "en",
  "visibility": "public",
  "isReblog": false,
  "isReply": false,
  "inReplyToId": null,
  "repliesCount": 0,
  "reblogsCount": 0,
  "favouritesCount": 0,
  "tags": [
    "development",
    "satires",
    "maintenance",
    "opensource",
    "ai",
    "techdebt",
    "devops",
    "webdev",
    "frontend",
    "backend"
  ],
  "mentions": [],
  "media": [],
  "cardUrl": "https://ilo.im/16gxw7",
  "accountAcct": "inautilo",
  "accountName": "Inautilo",
  "accountUrl": "https://mastodon.social/@inautilo",
  "accountFollowers": 556,
  "accountBot": false
}

Tips

• Hashtag timelines on a big instance (mastodon.social) include federated posts from many servers.
• Use localOnly to focus on one community's own members.
• Accounts can be given as user, user@server or a profile URL.
• Combine language with hashtags to filter noisy multilingual tags.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing: about $0.50 per 1,000 results. There is no monthly rental fee. Platform usage is minimal because the Actor runs on 128 MB with plain HTTP requests. Set Maximum cost per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly as soon as the limit is reached - you are never charged beyond it.

Scheduling and integrations

Create an Apify Schedule (for example daily at 08:00) and pass a since-date to get only new items each time. Connect the dataset to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make, n8n or a webhook to receive results automatically, or call the Actor from Python or JavaScript using the Apify API client.

Limitations

Only public posts are returned. Most instances disable anonymous full-text status search; single-word queries automatically fall back to the hashtag timeline. Some instances restrict public timelines to logged-in users - choose another instance in that case.

FAQ

Do I need an account or API key on the source site? No. Only public, unauthenticated endpoints are used.

Do I need proxies? No. The Actor makes a small number of well-spaced requests to official APIs, so datacenter IPs work fine.

Why did my run return fewer items than maxItems? The source simply had no more items matching your filters and date range, or your maximum cost per run was reached.

Is this legal? The Actor only reads publicly available data through documented public endpoints. You are responsible for using the data in line with the source's terms and applicable laws such as GDPR, especially for personal data.

Something broke? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab with your run ID and we will fix it quickly.