LinkDigest MCP server

Turn a social media link into text a language model can read — transcript, on-screen text, image descriptions, caption and metadata.

Hosted, remote (streamable HTTP). Nothing to install or run.

Website: linkdigest.dev · Registry: dev.linkdigest/linkdigest

The problem

Fetching a social link yourself returns nothing useful. Share URLs are tokenised (xsec_token, app_code_link), the content lives in video and images rather than HTML, and the server sends an app-download shell or a login wall instead of the post.

$ curl -s 'https://xhslink.com/o/1WiQ1QI6Uc0' | grep -o '<title>.*</title>'
<title>小红书</title>

That is the whole page. No caption, no images, no text.

Install

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http linkdigest \
  https://linkdigest.dev/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer ld_live_..."

Cursor — ~/.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "linkdigest": {
      "url": "https://linkdigest.dev/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ld_live_..." }
    }
  }
}

A key is issued at linkdigest.dev/app/keys. Three digests are free, no card.

The tool

digest_url(url, format, job_id) — only url is required.

Argument	Notes
url	The post URL, including any share tokens.
format	markdown (default, best for reading) or json (structured).
job_id	Collect a digest already running. Pass this instead of url — re-sending the url would start the work again.

You do not call it yourself. The tool description tells the agent to reach for it whenever it meets a social link it cannot read, so it happens mid-task without being asked.

A long video may not finish inside one call. When that happens the result names a job id; call the tool again with that job_id and no url to collect it.

What comes back

platform, author, title, posted_at, caption, transcript ({t, text}), ocr_text, images ({description, ocr}), key_points, raw_markdown, source_url, transcript_source, degraded.

Two are worth knowing about:

• transcript_source — native_captions, asr, or none. Captions the platform already published are exact; speech recognition is not. Treating them identically eventually quotes a mis-heard number back at someone as fact.
• degraded — what did not fully work, in plain words. Empty on a clean run. It exists because a digest once returned a well-formed, completely empty result during a provider outage and was cached for thirty days.

Platforms

Checked against real posts, not documentation.

Platform	Status
Xiaohongshu 小红书	Works — image notes and video notes, no login needed
Douyin 抖音	Works — video posts and image notes (图文)
TikTok	Works — short links resolve. Rate-limits under load
YouTube	Works — native captions where published, otherwise a watched transcript
X	Works — posts with video or images
Web pages / articles	Works — readable article text, title, author, date
Bilibili	Not supported. Returns HTTP 412 to our server's address. Needs a proxy
Instagram	Not verified. Wired, not confirmed end to end
Facebook	Not supported. Serves no post content to logged-out requests

The rows that do not work are listed on purpose. Finding out after you have wired something in is worse than knowing now.

How long it takes

Measured, not estimated:

• Already-digested link: about 1 second — anything anyone has run before is cached, and cached links are free
• Xiaohongshu note with images: 1–2 minutes
• YouTube video with captions: about 2.5 minutes

Notes

• Chinese speech is transcribed with SenseVoice, which is materially more accurate on Mandarin than Whisper-class models.
• Media is never stored or served. It is processed in a temporary directory deleted before the request returns; only the text digest is kept.
• A blocked or removed post returns an error, not a description of the error page.

Also available

A REST API (POST https://linkdigest.dev/api/v1/digest), a web app, and Apify Store actors for bulk runs. See linkdigest.dev.