Mastodon Scraper - Hashtags, Accounts & Trending Posts (No Login)

Scrape public Mastodon posts by hashtag, account or trending on any Mastodon instance (mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, mstdn.social, infosec.exchange ...) and export clean JSON / CSV / Excel. Uses the official public Mastodon REST API - no account, no access token, no browser, no proxies. 80 posts in about 2 seconds.

Who uses it

• Brand & community managers: monitor your product hashtag or competitors' accounts across the fediverse every day.
• Social listening & PR agencies: add Mastodon to your Twitter/X, Bluesky and Reddit monitoring - many developer, open-source, science and journalism communities moved here.
• Researchers: collect posts on a topic with engagement metrics (replies, boosts, favourites) and language.
• Content & LLM pipelines: feed trending posts or a hashtag stream into n8n, Make, Zapier or an LLM summary.
• Developer relations: track #opensource, #python, #rust and your project's tag, and find the most-followed authors.

Input

Field	Description
hashtags	Hashtags without #. Each is read from every instance in instances.
accounts	user@instance (e.g. Gargron@mastodon.social).
trending	Also fetch each instance's trending posts.
instances	Servers to read from (default mastodon.social). Large servers federate posts from the whole network.
maxPostsPerSource	1-5000 (default 40).
onlyNewerThanDays	Date filter, e.g. 1 for a daily scheduled monitor.
keywords, language	Optional text / language filters (filtered posts are not charged).
localOnly, includeReplies, includeBoosts	Fine-tuning.

Example - daily brand monitor:

{ "hashtags": ["n8n", "selfhosted"], "accounts": ["n8n_io@mastodon.social"], "instances": ["mastodon.social", "fosstodon.org"], "onlyNewerThanDays": 1, "maxPostsPerSource": 500 }

Output (one row per post)

{
  "sourceType": "hashtag",
  "source": "python",
  "instance": "mastodon.social",
  "id": "117487750868640455",
  "url": "https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/117487750868640455",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-23T02:00:07.935Z",
  "text": "UUIDv7 doesn't have the properties you think it does ... #distributed #python",
  "language": "en",
  "author": "lobsters@mastodon.social",
  "authorName": "Lobsters",
  "authorFollowers": 4029,
  "replies": 0, "boosts": 0, "favourites": 1,
  "hashtags": ["distributed", "python"],
  "mentions": ["robalex@indieweb.social"],
  "linkUrl": "https://lobste.rs/s/kcyzco",
  "linkTitle": "UUIDv7 doesn't have the properties you think it does",
  "media": [],
  "isReply": false, "isBoost": false
}

HTML is converted to plain text. Posts are deduplicated within a run. A RUN_SUMMARY record is saved in the key-value store.

Pricing (pay per event)

• $0.001 per post saved (mastodon-post) - $1 per 1,000 posts.
• Tiny start fee per run (apify-actor-start).
• Failed sources, duplicates and filtered posts are not charged. Set "Maximum cost per run" to cap spend.

Notes & limits

• Only public posts that the instance serves without login. Free-text search of posts requires a logged-in account on Mastodon, so this Actor uses hashtags, accounts and trends (plus the keyword filter).
• Respect each instance's rules and the authors' privacy; do not use the data for spam. Not affiliated with Mastodon gGmbH.

FAQ

Do I need a Mastodon account or token? No. Which instance should I use? mastodon.social sees most of the network; add niche servers (fosstodon.org for open source, infosec.exchange for security) for more local posts.