Mastodon & Lemmy Scraper: Fediverse Posts, Profiles, Followers & Comments (No Login)

Scrape Mastodon and Lemmy in one Actor, with no account, cookies or API key. Get Mastodon hashtag posts across many servers at once, account posts, profiles, followers and following lists, people search, trending posts and hashtags and replies, plus Lemmy keyword search (posts, comments or communities), community posts, full comment threads and community lists. Export to JSON, CSV, Excel or Google Sheets, or push to Make, Zapier, n8n, your AI agent or an API.

It reads the official public REST API that every Mastodon and Lemmy server publishes, so it's fast, stable and cheap: no headless browser, no proxies, about $0.50 per 1,000 results.

What can this Fediverse scraper do?

Network	Mode	Input	You get
Mastodon	Hashtag posts	tattoo, #opensource + a list of servers	Posts with text, author, favourites, boosts, replies, hashtags, links, images/video, language, timestamps. Duplicates across servers are removed
Mastodon	Account posts	@user@server or profile URL	An account's posts (filters: no replies, no boosts, media only, date range)
Mastodon	Profiles	@user@server or profile URL	Bio, profile fields, followers, following, post count, join date, last post, bot/group flags, optional emails and websites
Mastodon	Followers / Following	@user@server	Follower and following lists as full profiles
Mastodon	Search accounts	keywords (tattoo artist)	Matching people from each server you list (up to 40 per server; Mastodon's logged-out limit)
Mastodon	Trending posts	servers	The server's trending posts right now
Mastodon	Trending hashtags	servers	Trending tags with 7-day use and account counts
Mastodon	Replies to a post	post URL	The reply thread under a post
Lemmy	Keyword search	keywords + Lemmy servers	Posts, comments or communities matching the words (full-text)
Lemmy	Community posts	!technology@lemmy.world or /c/ URL	Posts with title, body, link, score, up/down votes, comment count
Lemmy	Post comments	https://lemmy.world/post/123	The whole comment tree, with depth and parent comment ID
Lemmy	Communities	keywords, or nothing for the top list	Community name, description, subscribers, posts, comments, active users per day/week/month

Built-in extras

• Many servers in one run: Mastodon is federated, so each server only shows the posts it knows about. List mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, hachyderm.io, mstdn.social (or any others) and the Actor merges them and removes duplicates by the post's ActivityPub URI.
• Lead mode (extractContacts): pulls emails and websites from bios and profile links. Useful for creator outreach and B2B prospecting.
• Date, language and reply filters: since/until, language (e.g. en), excludeReplies, excludeBoosts, onlyMedia. Newest-first streams stop as soon as they pass your since date, so you don't pay for old posts.
• Polite and respectful by default: at most about one request per second per server, it reads each server's x-ratelimit-* headers and slows down before hitting the limit, retries on 429/5xx, skips NSFW and sensitive-media posts (skipNsfw), and skips Mastodon accounts that opted out of search indexing (respectNoIndex). Skipped items don't count toward your limits, so asking for 100 posts gets you 100 kept posts when that many exist.
• One bad input doesn't kill the run: a missing account or an offline server is logged in the run summary and the rest carries on.
• Predictable cost: maxItems and Apify's "max cost per run" are both respected exactly.

Why scrape Mastodon and Lemmy?

Mastodon has hundreds of thousands of monthly active users across thousands of servers (mastodon.social alone reports about 270,000), and Lemmy is the biggest federated Reddit alternative. Both are public, open-protocol networks where developers, researchers, journalists, artists and privacy-minded users talk in the open.

• Social listening and brand monitoring: track hashtags, products and competitors across the open social web, together with our Bluesky Scraper.
• Reddit-style research on Lemmy: full-text search of posts and comments, whole comment threads and community stats.
• Lead generation and influencer discovery: search people by niche, export followers of a competitor, and pull emails and websites from bios.
• Trend tracking: daily snapshots of trending posts and hashtags per server.
• Academic research, NLP and LLM datasets: collect posts and comments by topic, date range and language.
• AI agents and RAG pipelines: clean, flat JSON that's ready for LLMs.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free.
2. Pick a mode (e.g. Mastodon: posts with a #hashtag).
3. Enter hashtags, accounts, search terms, communities or URLs (one per line), and the servers to read from.
4. Set Max items and click Start.
5. Download your data as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or connect it via API or integrations.

Example: one hashtag across four Mastodon servers, English only, last week

{
  "mode": "hashtagPosts",
  "hashtags": ["opensource"],
  "instances": ["mastodon.social", "fosstodon.org", "hachyderm.io", "mstdn.social"],
  "language": "en",
  "since": "2026-10-16",
  "maxItemsPerInput": 500
}

Example: Lemmy full-text search across two servers

{
  "mode": "lemmySearch",
  "searchTerms": ["home depot", "lowes"],
  "lemmyInstances": ["lemmy.world", "lemmy.ml"],
  "lemmySearchType": "Comments",
  "lemmySort": "New",
  "maxItemsPerInput": 200
}

Example: people search with emails and websites

{
  "mode": "searchAccounts",
  "searchTerms": ["tattoo artist", "illustrator"],
  "instances": ["mastodon.social", "mastodon.art", "mstdn.social"],
  "extractContacts": true
}

Example: every comment on a Lemmy post

{ "mode": "lemmyPostComments", "urls": ["https://lemmy.world/post/53446449"], "maxItemsPerInput": 1000 }

Output example (Mastodon hashtag post, real record)

{
  "type": "mastodonPost",
  "platform": "mastodon",
  "url": "https://mastodon.social/@poliintl/117489993412846364",
  "instance": "mastodon.social",
  "authorAcct": "poliintl@mastodon.social",
  "authorName": "Poli International",
  "text": "Photoresponsive tattoo ink fades in sunlight and reappears under UV light. Long term safety data is currently missing. #tattoo ...",
  "language": "en",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-23T11:30:26.443Z",
  "repliesCount": 0,
  "boostsCount": 0,
  "favouritesCount": 0,
  "hashtags": ["tattoo"],
  "links": ["https://poliinternational.com/blog/the-tattoo-that-turns-off-in-sunlight-and-back-on-under-uv/"],
  "linkTitle": "The Tattoo That Turns Off in Sunlight—and Back On Under UV",
  "media": [],
  "isReply": false,
  "sourceInput": "#tattoo"
}

Lemmy posts have title, body, linkUrl, community, author, score, upvotes, downvotes and commentsCount. Lemmy comments have text, depth, parentCommentId and postTitle. Profiles have acct, bio, fields, followersCount, followingCount, postsCount and optional emails/websites. Every record has platform, type, url, sourceInput and scrapedAt. A RUN_SUMMARY record in the key-value store lists item counts, skipped items, API requests and any input errors.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.0005 per result ($0.50 per 1,000) on the Free plan, cheaper on paid Apify plans (down to $0.30 per 1,000), plus a tiny per-run start fee. You only pay for results saved to the dataset. Apify's free monthly credit covers thousands of results.

Limits and honest notes

• Mastodon has no logged-out full-text post search. Servers only allow keyword search of posts for signed-in users, so this Actor finds posts by hashtag, account, trends and replies. (Lemmy full-text search works without login.)
• Each Mastodon server returns the hashtag posts it has seen. Big servers (mastodon.social) see the most; add niche servers for niche topics.
• Mastodon people search returns up to 40 accounts per term per server when logged out. Add more servers to get more.
• Accounts that hide their follower lists, private posts and direct messages are never returned.
• Lemmy since stops early only with lemmySort: New; with other sorts it filters as it goes.
• The Actor only reads public data and never posts, follows, votes or messages anyone. Please respect each server's rules and the people in your data (GDPR/CCPA apply to personal data you store).

FAQ

Do I need a Mastodon or Lemmy account? No. Every mode works without login or API keys.

Which servers are supported? Any Mastodon-API server (Mastodon, and most Glitch/Hometown forks) and any Lemmy server (0.19+). Some other software (Pixelfed, Misskey) is not supported yet.

Can I schedule it? Yes. Use Apify Schedules (e.g. a daily hashtag or trending run) and send results to Google Sheets, Slack, a webhook or your database.

Can AI agents use it? Yes. Inputs and outputs are simple JSON, and it works through Apify's API and MCP server.

Related Spriggs Data actors

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Keywords: Mastodon scraper, Lemmy scraper, Fediverse scraper, Mastodon API, Mastodon hashtag scraper, Mastodon followers export, Lemmy comments scraper, Lemmy API, ActivityPub scraper, Reddit alternative data, open social web data.