(Version française)

An extension for extracting and downloading toots (posts on Mastodon) for text mining and analysis.

Cite this program

If you use this extension for your research, please reference it as follows:

Moncomble, F. (2024). MastoScraper (Version 0.8) [JavaScript]. Arras, France: Université d’Artois. Available at: https://fmoncomble.github.io/mastoscraper/

Important notice

Mastodon, which forms part of the fediverse, is unlike most other social networks. Please reflect on the your planned use of the content you are scraping, and consider studying the terms and conditions of the various instances you are drawing data from.
Click here for some relevant reading material.

Installation

Firefox

Chrome/Edge

Remember to pin the add-on to the toolbar.

Instructions for use

• Click the add-on’s icon in the toolbar.
• On first using the add-on, follow the authentication procedure to authorize the app on Mastodon. All credentials are stored locally on your computer, not on a remote server.
• Build your search query with at least one keyword, and click Search.
• Choose your preferred output format:
  • XML/XTZ for an XML file to import into TXM using the XML/TEI-Zero module
    • When initiating the import process, open the “Textual planes” section and type ref in the field labelled “Out of text to edit”
  • TXT for plain text
  • CSV
  • XLSX
  • JSON
• (Optional) Enter the maximum number of toots to collect.
• You can stop the process at any time by clicking Abort.
• Click Download to collect the output or Reset to start afresh.

Known limitations

Searching by instance and language is not built into the Mastodon API, meaning that results are filtered from the whole query response, which may take some time depending on the chosen criteria.