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, as a plugin — this repo is a Cursor plugin (.cursor-plugin/plugin.json + mcp.json + skills/).
Install it from cursor.directory, then set the key once in your shell:

export LINKDIGEST_API_KEY=ld_live_...

The plugin's mcp.json reads ${LINKDIGEST_API_KEY}; no key is stored in the repo. Without it,
the tool still lists and tools/call returns a 401 that says where to get one.

Cursor, by hand — ~/.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.

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.

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.

Dify

The same tool as a Dify plugin lives in dify/ — source, manifest and privacy policy. Install it from the Dify Marketplace and paste your API key into the provider credential.

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.