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.
