LinkDigest: turn Xiaohongshu, Douyin, TikTok, YouTube and X links into text your agent can read

A developer built LinkDigest, an API and MCP server that converts links from Xiaohongshu, Douyin, TikTok, YouTube and X into agent-readable text, extracting video transcripts, on-screen text, image descriptions and key points that plain HTML fetches discard. Measured runs show a 17-image Xiaohongshu note returning 381 on-screen text fragments and 13 key points in 119 seconds, while a cached YouTube talk returned 426 transcript segments in about a second. The service is listed in the official MCP registry as dev.linkdigest/linkdigest and offers three free digests before a $9 monthly plan for 500 credits.

I build LinkDigest https://linkdigest.dev/?ref=devto . Every number below is from a measured run recorded in the project log; nothing is projected. Agents are good at reading and bad at opening. Give Claude Code, Cursor, or a Dify workflow a link from Xiaohongshu, Douyin, TikTok, YouTube or X and the usual tool — fetch the URL, parse the HTML — returns one of three things: an app-download shell, a login wall, or a page whose body is 264 characters of navigation because the post itself lives in a JSON blob or in a video. The agent reports "nothing useful here" and it is telling the truth about the HTML. The substance of these posts is not text. It is speech in a video, words printed on images, screenshots of code, a recipe laid out in a photo. A plain fetch throws all of that away, and a share link from the app carries a token that expires in a few weeks, so even the HTML you do get is different depending on which link and which user-agent you used. LinkDigest does the reading on its own servers and hands back text. One call: curl -X POST https://linkdigest.dev/api/v1/digest \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $LINKDIGEST KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEvIs9y1uog", "format": "json"}' returns the post's transcript with timecodes, every fragment of on-screen text, a description and OCR of each image, the caption and metadata, and a list of key points — as JSON, or as Markdown if you ask for it. Long media answers in two steps: a 202 with a job id, then the digest when it is done. Measured, not estimated: | post | what came back | time | |---|---|---| | a 17-image Xiaohongshu note | 17 images described and read, 381 on-screen text fragments, 13 key points | 119 s | | a Xiaohongshu video note | ASR transcript, 56 on-screen text fragments, 12 key points | ~4 min | | a YouTube talk native captions | 426 transcript segments, 190 on-screen text fragments | ~1 s cached | | a two-photo X post | both photos described, 3 text fragments | ~20 s | claude mcp add --transport http linkdigest https://linkdigest.dev/mcp \ --header "Authorization: Bearer $LINKDIGEST KEY" One tool, digest url url, format . The tool description tells the model exactly when to reach for it and which platforms are out, so an agent does not confidently hand you a failure. It is in the official MCP registry as dev.linkdigest/linkdigest , on Apify as three Actors, and submitted to the Dify marketplace. This is the part I would want to know before pasting a key: degraded field. A digest that read nothing is free. Three digests free, no card. Then $9 a month for 500 credits — a typical post is 1 credit, video 2 per started minute, and links anyone has already digested are free forever. https://linkdigest.dev/pricing https://linkdigest.dev/pricing?ref=devto I kept pasting Xiaohongshu and Douyin links into agents and watching them fail, and the failures were silent — a confident summary of a login page. Two of the bugs I hit while building this are written up separately: share links have two domains and one of them fails silently https://linkdigest.dev/blog/xiaohongshu-share-links-have-two-domains?ref=devto , and what it actually takes to read a Xiaohongshu post from a server https://linkdigest.dev/blog/reading-xiaohongshu-from-a-server?ref=devto . If you try it and something reads thin, reply here — I fix these the same day.