What Can You Read From Mastodon, Substack and PeerTube? Odysee, BitChute, Dailymotion, Deezer and Mixcloud APIs

You can now read public data from Mastodon, Substack, PeerTube, Odysee, BitChute, Dailymotion, Deezer and Mixcloud with one API key and no account on any of them: profiles with follower counts, posts and videos with view, like and comment counts, comment threads, and transcripts where the platform publishes captions. Every response comes back in the same shape as the platforms you may already use, so a Mastodon post and a Bluesky post read the same way.

Each platform also sets its own limits, and those are stated plainly below, per platform. Some are worth knowing before you plan anything: Dailymotion has no public comments, Substack shows subscriber numbers only as a rounded badge, and a Mastodon account can opt out of being read at all.

If you are comparing these against the larger networks, what each social platform's official API allows covers YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and the rest.

Changelog: added Odysee, BitChute, Dailymotion, Deezer, Mixcloud, PeerTube, Mastodon and Substack.

What can you read from Mastodon?

Profiles, an account's posts, single posts and their replies. Full reference: Mastodon API docs.

• Profile: follower, following and post counts, bio, avatar, header image and the links on the profile.
• Posts: an account's public posts, newest first, each with favourite, reply and boost counts. Boosts of other people's posts are left out, so you get what the account wrote.
• A post and its replies: one post with its counts and media, and the public replies to it in thread order.

Two things are different from a centralised network. A Mastodon account lives on one server among thousands, so you pass the handle with its server, user@server (for example Gargron@mastodon.social), or a profile link, and the account is read from the server that hosts it.

And accounts can opt out of search engine indexing. When one has, we do not return it: requests for that account are refused, and its replies are left out of other threads. Servers also return only about 60 replies to a reader who is not signed in, so a very long thread is not complete.

What can you read from Substack?

Writer profiles, publications, a publication's posts, single posts and their comments. Full reference: Substack API docs.

• Profile: a writer's followers, bio, links and main publication.
• Publication: name, description, author, custom domain, and whether it sells paid subscriptions. Publications on their own domain are accepted as well as name.substack.com.
• Posts: newest first, with reactions, comments, restacks and word count.
• A post: its text and the same counts.
• Comments: every public comment on a post, replies included, each linked to the comment it answers.

What Substack does not publish, you do not get:

• No exact subscriber count. Substack shows subscribers only as a rounded badge, such as "1.2M+", and that badge is what you get, as text.
• No view counts. Substack does not show them on posts.
• Paywalled posts are previews. For a subscriber-only post, the text is the public preview and the response marks it as truncated.
• Paid-only comments are hidden. Some publications show comments only to paid subscribers. Those are not available, and the request says so.

What can you read from PeerTube?

Channels, their videos, single videos, comments and replies, transcripts, and search. Full reference: PeerTube API docs.

• Channel: followers, following, video count, avatar, banner and creation date.
• Videos: a channel's videos, newest first.
• A video: views, likes, comment count, duration, tags, publish date and channel.
• Comments and replies: top-level comments, newest first, including those posted from other fediverse servers, with each thread's reply count, and every reply under a comment.
• Transcript: the captions as one block of text plus timed cues, with a flag saying whether the instance generated them automatically.

Like Mastodon, PeerTube is spread across many independent servers. Pass a channel as name@instance or a channel link on its instance, and a video as its link. Search runs through Sepia Search, the PeerTube project's own index, so it covers the instances Sepia indexes, not every server.

What can you read from Dailymotion?

Channels, their full upload history, single videos, transcripts and search. Full reference: Dailymotion API docs.

• Channel: followers, following, video count, lifetime views, verification badge, country and creation date.
• Videos: a channel's public uploads, newest first, all the way back to the first one.
• A video: views, likes, duration, tags, upload date and channel.
• Transcript: captions as text plus timed cues, in the language you ask for when the video has it. Most are generated automatically by Dailymotion.

Dailymotion has no public comments, so there is no comments call and a video's comment count is empty rather than zero. Search is capped by Dailymotion at the first 1,000 results for any query, so paging stops there.

What can you read from Odysee?

Channels, their videos, single videos, comments and search. Full reference: Odysee API docs.

• Channel: title, description, avatar, banner, subscriber count, number of videos, website and creation date.
• Videos: a channel's videos, newest first, with view and like counts.
• A video: title, description, duration, tags, release date, channel, and view, like and comment counts. Dislikes are included in the raw response.
• Comments: top-level comments with like and reply counts.

Search returns videos in Odysee's own order, with view and like counts.

What can you read from BitChute?

Channels, their videos, single videos and search. Full reference: BitChute API docs.

• Channel: name, description, subscriber count, video count, total views and creation date.
• Videos: a channel's public videos, newest first, with view counts.
• A video: title, description, hashtags, duration, publish date, channel, views and likes, with dislikes in the raw response.

Likes are on the single-video call, not the channel list. There is no comments call for BitChute, and a video's comment count is always empty.

What can you read from Deezer?

Artists, albums, tracks, playlists, podcasts, search and charts. Full reference: Deezer API docs.

• Artist: name, fans and album count, plus their most popular tracks and their albums, singles and EPs.
• Album: title, artist, label, UPC, release date, fans and its tracks.
• Track: title, artist, artwork, duration, release date, ISRC and tempo.
• Playlist: title, owner, description, track count, fans and its tracks, and any user's public playlists.
• Podcast: title, description, artwork, fans and its episodes, newest first. Deezer publishes no episode count.
• Search and charts: search tracks, albums, artists, playlists or podcasts, and read Deezer's global top lists.

Tempo is empty where Deezer has not measured it.

What can you read from Mixcloud?

Profiles, uploads, comments, followers, search and tags. Full reference: Mixcloud API docs.

• Profile: followers, following, upload count, bio, avatar, cover image and location.
• Uploads: a user's uploads, newest first, each with plays, favourites, reposts and comments.
• An upload: the same counts, plus duration, tags, description and the tracklist when the uploader published one.
• Comments, followers and following: the public comments on an upload, and the accounts following a user or followed by them.
• Search and tags: search uploads, users or tags, and a tag's popular uploads.

Search and tag results are ranked by Mixcloud and can change between calls.

What does a call look like?

The same as on every other platform: one GET request with your key in a header.

curl "https://api.truescrape.com/v1/mastodon/profile?handle=Gargron@mastodon.social" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY"

Lists page with a cursor: pass the one from the previous response to get the next page. Each platform's docs page lists every call with its parameters and an example response.

What happens when a request fails?

You are not charged. A request that errors, or comes back with nothing in it, costs nothing. That includes the platform limits above: a Mastodon account that opted out of indexing, a Substack post whose comments are for paid subscribers only, and a channel that does not exist are all free answers.

All of this is public data, read the way a visitor who is not signed in would see it. Nothing here signs in to any of these platforms, so anything behind a login, a paywall or a private account stays there. Whether a platform's terms allow automated collection is a separate question from whether the data is public. How those two come apart is worth reading before you build on any of it.