Mastodon Profile, Follower & Creator Scraper

Mastodon Scraper — Profiles, Followers, Bios & Creator Contacts

The premier Mastodon scraper and fediverse lead generation tool for extracting rich creator profiles, audience graphs, and verified contact links at scale — with zero login required. Extract structured profile records across any Mastodon server: fediverse handles, display names, bios, follower and post counts, verified link fields, account creation dates, bot flags, and auto-extracted websites, emails, and social profiles. Discover profiles via keyword search, direct handle queries, follower/following network crawling, or public server directories.

Export thousands of records seamlessly to JSON, CSV, Excel, or direct API integration.

Built for growth hackers, B2B lead generation specialists, influencer marketers, talent recruiters sourcing open-source developers, journalists investigating open networks, and researchers mapping social graphs across the fediverse.

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⚡ At a glance

Capability	Feature Details
Target Network	Mastodon fediverse network (any public instance e.g., mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, mas.to)
Discovery Modes	5-in-1: Keyword searches, direct handle lookup, followers graph, following graph, and instance directory
Contact Extraction	Auto-extracts emails, official websites, GitHub, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Patreon links
Scale & Pagination	Unlocked deep pagination supporting 1,000+ to 50,000+ accounts per run with zero hard caps
Speed & Performance	Pure HTTP streaming engine — collects 500+ accounts in under 30 seconds
Authentication	100% keyless and login-free; no browser automation or heavy overhead required
De-duplication	Canonical profile URL and handle de-duplication guaranteeing 0 duplicates across mixed sources
Export Formats	Clean JSON, NDJSON, CSV, Excel (.xlsx), HTML tables, and automated Apify REST API
Compute Footprint	Extremely lightweight memory profile (256 MB - 512 MB), zero browser overhead

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🔎 Why scrape Mastodon?

Mastodon is the dominant decentralized social platform of the fediverse — a global, open-source ecosystem consisting of thousands of independently operated servers and millions of active public profiles. Unlike closed corporate social networks that lock user profiles behind aggressive walled gardens, phone verification walls, and expensive enterprise API paywalls, Mastodon operates entirely on open protocols. This makes a dedicated Mastodon scraper one of the most effective, scalable avenues for organic creator discovery, market intelligence, and B2B lead generation.

Every public profile on Mastodon contains structured business intelligence:

• Global Handles & Identity: Globally unique federated handles (e.g., @username@domain) making cross-platform entity matching accurate and reliable.
• Engagement & Reach Metrics: Accurate follower, following, and total post metrics reflecting true audience reach without algorithmic distortion.
• Structured Profile Fields: Unlike ordinary bio text, Mastodon provides structured metadata fields where founders, developers, writers, and executives display their official websites, GitHub profiles, portfolios, and storefronts.
• High-Converting Lead Data: The most influential profiles actively publish verifiable contact links, turning raw social graphs into high-intent B2B outreach databases.

Manually collecting Mastodon accounts is impractical. Search results are federated across multiple server boundaries, large follower lists require cursor-based pagination, and contact details are embedded deep within HTML attributes. This Mastodon scraper automates the entire ingestion pipeline: it traverses pagination links, resolves handles, parses bio text, extracts contact links, de-duplicates profiles, and formats the data into tabular records ready for immediate CRM import.

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🎯 Key Use Cases & Business Applications

1. High-Intent B2B Lead Generation

Scraping the followers of industry thought leaders or tech executives yields hyper-targeted prospect lists. Because fediverse users explicitly choose who they follow without algorithmic feed injection, their follower graphs represent authentic professional interest. Extracting their websites and contact links provides direct outreach pathways for sales teams.

2. Developer & Technical Talent Sourcing

Tech communities have migrated heavily to specialized instances such as fosstodon.org, hachyderm.io, and infosec.exchange. Technical recruiters can query developer keywords or crawl prominent open-source maintainers to discover senior software engineers, complete with verified GitHub handles and personal portfolios.

3. Creator & Influencer Partnerships

Brands seeking genuine influencer partnerships can identify active creators across journalism, photography, literature, and technology. The scraper collects verified portfolio links and historical post counts, allowing marketers to evaluate creator authenticity and engagement before initiating outreach.

4. Fediverse Network & Social Graph Mapping

Researchers and data scientists can map the topology of decentralized communities. By crawling followers and following lists recursively, analysts can identify bridge nodes, calculate centrality metrics, and visualize how ideas spread across independent server boundaries.

5. CRM & Prospect Database Enrichment

Marketing teams with existing lists of fediverse handles or usernames can run batch enrichment runs. The scraper retrieves up-to-date bios, follower counts, verified links, and profile avatars, maintaining high data freshness in HubSpot, Salesforce, or Airtable.

6. Media Monitoring & Public Discourse Analysis

Journalists and investigative researchers can track discussions across specialized journalist servers like journa.host. Automated scheduled runs capture emerging voices and track how public figures migrate across platforms.

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✨ Key Features & Technical Highlights

• ✅ Five Versatile Discovery Modes:
  • Keyword Search: Run federated queries across global account databases by profession, topic, or interest (e.g., "journalist", "cybersecurity").
  • Direct Handle Lookups: Provide lists of specific accounts (e.g., Gargron, username@server.org) or profile URLs for instant bulk enrichment.
  • Follower Networks: Crawl the entire audience of key opinion leaders to acquire targeted niche networks.
  • Following Lists: Extract who an influential user follows to identify curated industry circles.
  • Instance Directory: Tap into the server-level directory of active users to capture broad regional or topical communities.
• ✅ Deep 1,000+ Results Pagination: Configured with smart cursor traversal (max_id link headers and offset handling) to crawl uninterrupted up to your requested maxItems.
• ✅ Automated Contact Intelligence: Built-in regex and DOM parsers extract emails, primary non-social website URLs, and external social media links from both bio copy and structured profile fields.
• ✅ Guaranteed Zero Duplicates: Deduplicates records using canonical profile URLs, ensuring clean datasets even when combining multiple keywords and follower seeds.
• ✅ Configurable Instance Routing: Direct the scraper to any Mastodon server (e.g., mastodon.social, infosec.exchange, journa.host) with seamless proxy support.
• ✅ Enterprise Ready Exports: Download clean datasets formatted for HubSpot, Salesforce, Airtable, Google Sheets, or custom data pipelines.
• ✅ Cost-Optimized Architecture: Executes as a lightweight HTTP process without browser overhead, keeping run costs to fractions of a cent per thousand profiles.

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🥊 Mastodon Scraper vs Traditional Social Scraping

Feature	Mastodon Scraper	Traditional Social Scrapers
API Key Requirement	❌ None (Public, keyless access)	⚠️ Expensive developer tiers
Login / Session Cookies	❌ None required	⚠️ High account ban risk
Contact Data Quality	🟢 Rich verified fields & portfolio links	🟡 Sparse, obfuscated bios
Pagination Reliability	🟢 Native cursor pagination (1K+ clean)	🔴 Frequent scroll stalls & rate locks
Anti-Bot Gating	🟢 Clean HTTP protocol compliance	🔴 Heavy Cloudflare / Turnstile challenges
Operational Cost	🟢 Datacenter friendly (< $0.05 / run)	🔴 Residential proxies + headless browsers
Data Freshness	🟢 Real-time live query	🟡 Stale third-party cache

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📥 Input Parameters

All parameters are optional. You can supply keyword searches, direct handles, follower seeds, or enable the instance directory.

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
instance	String	"mastodon.social"	Mastodon instance domain to query (e.g., mastodon.social, fosstodon.org).
searchTerms	Array	["journalist"]	Keywords to find accounts by name, handle, or bio. Federated across connected instances.
handles	Array	[]	Specific handles to look up (e.g., Gargron, username@server.org, or full profile URLs).
followersOf	Array	[]	Seed accounts whose followers you want to scrape for audience building.
followingOf	Array	[]	Seed accounts whose following list you want to scrape.
includeDirectory	Boolean	false	Enable pulling active accounts directly from the server's public profile directory.
includeContacts	Boolean	true	Automatically extract emails, websites, and social links from bios and profile fields.
maxItems	Integer	0	Maximum total accounts to return (0 = unlimited, governed by available results).
maxPagesPerSource	Integer	0	Pagination page limit per seed or query (0 = auto/unlimited, governed by maxItems).
proxyConfiguration	Object	{ "useApifyProxy": true }	Proxy configuration. Datacenter proxies are fully supported.

Example Input Configuration

{
  "instance": "mastodon.social",
  "searchTerms": ["journalist", "investigative", "editor"],
  "followersOf": ["Gargron"],
  "includeDirectory": false,
  "includeContacts": true,
  "maxItems": 1000,
  "maxPagesPerSource": 0,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

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📤 Output Data Structure

The scraper outputs rich, normalized JSON records containing identity attributes, audience metrics, verified links, and extracted contact channels.

Sample Output Record

{
  "id": "110264569437137765",
  "username": "sid",
  "acct": "sid@masto.twooter.org",
  "handle": "@sid@masto.twooter.org",
  "displayName": "Sid O'Knee",
  "bio": "Senior Cloud Architect & Open Source Contributor. #python #kubernetes #devops",
  "followersCount": 14820,
  "followingCount": 620,
  "statusesCount": 1845,
  "instance": "masto.twooter.org",
  "bot": false,
  "locked": false,
  "discoverable": true,
  "createdAt": "2021-04-12T14:22:10.000Z",
  "lastStatusAt": "2026-11-09T18:40:02.000Z",
  "avatar": "https://files.mastodon.social/cache/accounts/avatars/110/264/569/original/avatar.png",
  "header": "https://files.mastodon.social/cache/accounts/headers/110/264/569/original/header.png",
  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "Website",
      "value": "https://sid-engineer.dev",
      "url": "https://sid-engineer.dev",
      "verified": true
    },
    {
      "name": "GitHub",
      "value": "https://github.com/sidoKnee",
      "url": "https://github.com/sidoKnee",
      "verified": true
    }
  ],
  "verifiedLinks": [
    "https://sid-engineer.dev",
    "https://github.com/sidoKnee"
  ],
  "website": "https://sid-engineer.dev",
  "github": "sidoKnee",
  "email": "contact@sid-engineer.dev",
  "instagram": "",
  "twitter": "sid_cloud",
  "youtube": "",
  "tiktok": "",
  "linkedin": "sid-oknee",
  "twitch": "",
  "patreon": "",
  "profileUrl": "https://masto.twooter.org/@sid",
  "source": "search:journalist",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-10T14:30:00.000Z"
}

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📊 Complete Field Reference & Data Coverage

The output schema provides comprehensive field coverage across profile metadata and lead contact signals.

👤 Profile & Identity Information

Field	Type	Description	Coverage
id	String	Unique numerical identifier on the host instance	🟢 High (100%)
username	String	Local account username without domain suffix	🟢 High (100%)
acct	String	Full user string (username or username@domain)	🟢 High (100%)
handle	String	Canonical federated handle (@user@domain)	🟢 High (100%)
displayName	String	Human-readable user display name	🟢 High (~99%)
bio	String	Clean, plain-text profile summary with HTML tags stripped	🟢 High (~98%)
profileUrl	String	Canonical URL of the profile used for de-duplication	🟢 High (100%)
instance	String	Domain name of the home instance where the account resides	🟢 High (100%)
avatar	String	High-resolution direct profile picture URL	🟢 High (~95%)
header	String	Direct URL of the profile banner/header graphic	🟡 Conditional (~70%)

📈 Engagement & Account Metrics

Field	Type	Description	Coverage
followersCount	Number	Total registered followers across the fediverse	🟢 High (100%)
followingCount	Number	Total accounts followed by this profile	🟢 High (100%)
statusesCount	Number	Total public posts and toots published	🟢 High (100%)
bot	Boolean	True if flagged as an automated bot account	🟢 High (100%)
locked	Boolean	True if profile requires follow approval	🟢 High (100%)
discoverable	Boolean	True if opted in to directory discovery	🟡 Conditional (~80%)
createdAt	String	ISO 8601 creation timestamp of the account	🟢 High (100%)
lastStatusAt	String	Date/timestamp of the most recent public post	🟡 Conditional (~85%)

📬 Lead Generation & Extracted Contacts

Field	Type	Description	Coverage
website	String	Primary non-social website URL from fields or bio	🟢 High (~65% on creators)
verifiedLinks	Array	All URLs listed in structured profile fields	🟢 High (~60% on creators)
fields	Array	Complete objects of profile attributes (name, value, verified)	🟢 High (~75%)
email	String	Primary email address parsed from bio text or fields	🟡 Conditional (~12-18%)
github	String	Extracted GitHub username	🟡 Conditional (~30% on tech)
twitter	String	Extracted Twitter/X handle	🟡 Conditional (~25%)
linkedin	String	Extracted LinkedIn vanity slug	🟡 Conditional (~15%)
youtube	String	Extracted YouTube channel or handle	🟡 Conditional (~10%)
instagram	String	Extracted Instagram username	🟡 Conditional (~8%)
source	String	Input mode and seed that discovered this record	🟢 High (100%)
scrapedAt	String	UTC timestamp when this record was extracted	🟢 High (100%)

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🚀 Step-by-Step Usage Guide

1. Web Console Interface

1. Navigate to the Mastodon Scraper page on the Apify Console.
2. Select your target instance (default: mastodon.social).
3. Enter keywords in searchTerms, target handles in handles, or influencer accounts in followersOf.
4. Adjust maxItems to your target lead volume (e.g., 500 or 5000).
5. Click Start to initiate the extraction run.
6. Once complete, view the live tabular dataset or click Export to download your dataset.

2. Python API Client

Integrate Mastodon lead extraction directly into your automated pipelines:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the Apify client with your API token
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

# Configure input parameters for lead generation
run_input = {
    "instance": "mastodon.social",
    "searchTerms": ["journalist", "reporter"],
    "followersOf": ["Gargron"],
    "includeContacts": True,
    "maxItems": 1000,
    "maxPagesPerSource": 0,
}

# Run the actor and wait for completion
run = client.actor("haketa/mastodon-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Iterate through dataset items and print verified leads
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item.get("website") or item.get("email"):
        print(f"Lead: {item['displayName']} ({item['handle']}) | Site: {item.get('website')} | Email: {item.get('email')}")

3. Node.js API Client

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN',
});

const run = await client.actor('haketa/mastodon-scraper').call({
    instance: 'mastodon.social',
    searchTerms: ['founder', 'cto'],
    maxItems: 500,
    maxPagesPerSource: 0,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Successfully extracted ${items.length} Mastodon profiles.`);

4. Direct cURL / REST API

Trigger headless runs from any terminal or CI/CD workflow:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/haketa~mastodon-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "instance": "mastodon.social",
    "searchTerms": ["developer", "engineer"],
    "maxItems": 250,
    "maxPagesPerSource": 0
  }'

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🔒 Data Hygiene & Compliance Best Practices

When operating data extraction at scale on decentralized networks, observing respectful scraping hygiene ensures reliable long-term data collection:

• Honor Rate Limits: While public instances have generous limits, avoid extreme concurrency against smaller non-profit community servers.
• Respect Privacy Settings: The scraper automatically reflects the locked and discoverable flags present in user metadata. Honor these flags when building outreach cadences.
• Focus on Business Leads: Prioritize profiles with active verifiedLinks and explicit portfolio markers, which yield substantially higher email deliverability and response rates.

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💡 Advanced Scraping Strategies & Best Practices

1. Targeting Domain-Specific Instances: Mastodon is divided into dedicated topic instances. For cybersecurity leads, query infosec.exchange; for open-source developers, scrape fosstodon.org or hachyderm.io; for journalists, target journa.host.
2. Follower Graph Mining (followersOf): Scraping the followers of well-known industry figures yields hyper-targeted B2B prospect lists that share specific professional interests.
3. Focus on verifiedLinks: Mastodon's link verification mechanism allows users to cryptographically prove ownership of their personal websites or GitHub accounts. Profiles with verified fields represent high-authority leads.
4. Automated Scheduled Monitoring: Schedule weekly runs on key hashtags or competitor follower graphs to identify new community entrants and emerging creators automatically.
5. Combine Search with Directory: Use searchTerms for thematic relevance and toggle includeDirectory: true when you need large volumes of recently active accounts.
6. Integrate with CRM Webhooks: Configure Apify dataset integrations to push extracted leads directly into HubSpot or Salesforce whenever a scheduled run finishes.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Do I need a Mastodon account or API key to use this scraper?

No. The actor leverages open public protocol endpoints, requiring no personal login, access token, or user credentials.

How does deep pagination work?

The actor dynamically inspects cursor markers across follower lists and server directories. Setting maxPagesPerSource: 0 allows the crawler to paginate deeply until reaching your requested maxItems.

Are datacenter proxies sufficient?

Yes. Mastodon instances do not require expensive residential proxies. The default Apify datacenter proxy configuration provides reliable, cost-effective performance.

What makes this different from scraping Twitter or Threads?

Mastodon provides clean, public, un-obfuscated profile structures with dedicated website and link-verification fields. It is not restricted by aggressive anti-scraping walls, ensuring reliable data extraction at predictable costs.

Can I export directly to Google Sheets or CRMs?

Yes. You can export datasets in CSV or Excel formats, or connect Apify webhooks and Zapier / Make integrations to stream leads directly into HubSpot, Salesforce, or Airtable.

What is the difference between local and remote followers?

When scraping followers on a given instance, local accounts (hosted on that server) have 100% complete follower graphs. For remote federated accounts, the host server knows the subset of followers connected through federated relay activities.

Why is the email field sometimes empty?

Most Mastodon users prefer publishing personal website URLs, GitHub profiles, or verified portfolio links rather than plain-text email addresses in their bios. Check website and verifiedLinks for primary contact methods.

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📋 Changelog

Version 1.2.0 (2026-11)

• Deep 1,000+ Pagination: Re-architected pagination limits so maxPagesPerSource: 0 enables auto-unlimited deep crawling governed strictly by maxItems.
• Fast Prefill Optimization: Streamlined prefill parameters to execute verified discovery runs in under 30 seconds.
• Enhanced Contact Parsing: Improved extraction patterns for personal portfolio domains, email addresses, and social handles from custom bio fields.
• Strict Zero-Duplicate Filtering: Upgraded canonical handle and URL normalization to eliminate duplicate records across mixed keyword and follower sources.

Version 1.1.0 (2026-10)

• Added structured profile field extraction (fields array and verifiedLinks).
• Introduced direct handle lookup mode and server directory pagination.
• Integrated dual-channel dataset and key-value store output mirroring.

Version 1.0.0 (2026-10)

• Initial release featuring keyword search and follower graph scraping with datacenter proxy support.