The Fediverse, minus the federated API pain

Mastodon is the flagship of the Fediverse — millions of monthly users spread across thousands of instances, all speaking the same open Mastodon API. That openness means public accounts and timelines are fetchable with no login, no key, and no scraping wall.

The Mastodon Scraper talks to any instance's REST API in three modes — profile, posts, and hashtag timeline.

{ "mode": "posts", "handle": "Gargron", "instance": "mastodon.social", "maxResults": 20 }

Account rows carry the follower graph and toot counts; post rows carry content plus favourites / reblogs / replies:

{
  "source_mode": "posts",
  "acct": "Gargron", "username": "Gargron",
  "display_name": "Eugen Rochko",
  "followers_count": "382463", "following_count": "738",
  "statuses_count": "82172",
  "url": "https://mastodon.social/users/Gargron/statuses/117206369050571169/activity"
}

Why this over the website

Cross-instance research means talking to many different APIs. This normalizes them into one schema — pass the instance and handle, get consistent rows for profiles, toots and hashtags. No OAuth dance, no per-instance clients.

Use it for

Monitoring a community or thread across instances, tracking how a hashtag spreads, audience/account research, or corpus-building from decentralized public posts. One caveat worth knowing: a small number of large instances (mastodon.social included) scrub toot bodies for anonymous datacenter requests — account and engagement data still come through; if you need full post text on those, point it at an instance that doesn't gate, or use a datacenter-friendly approach.