Social Signal

What Social Signal does

The Social Signal MCP server provides two focused measurements for public social data. social_topic_volume counts posts matching a topic over a requested period and groups the results into time buckets. The count spans Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, and Hacker News. social_account_activity reports posting cadence and engagement for one account on Bluesky or Mastodon.

These tools are intended for directional trend checks and account-activity analysis, not a complete census of social media. X/Twitter is not included because its API is paid. The available sources are public endpoints for Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, and Hacker News, and the package does not require authentication.

How it works

The Social Signal MCP server can be reached through Pipeworx over MCP or used as a standalone local process. The hosted pack endpoint is available at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/social-signal/mcp; the full gateway is at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp. A pack endpoint exposes the Social Signal tools and also includes Pipeworx shared meta-tools such as ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, and remember/recall.

The standalone package communicates over stdin and stdout and exposes only this pack's tools. The same operations are also available through the gateway's HTTP API, including POST /v1/tools/social_topic_volume and tool inspection through GET /v1/tools/{tool_name}.

Source-specific handling affects the returned measurements. Reddit filtering excludes subreddit entries so they do not appear as posts. Hacker News searches retain the highest observed result count when pagination reaches its limit. Bluesky buckets are collected newest-first within a request budget, so a throttling gap can occur at the older edge of the requested window.

Setup and configuration

For a hosted MCP connection, add the pack endpoint to an MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "social-signal": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/social-signal/mcp"
    }
  }
}

For local use, run the npm package through a stdio configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "social-signal": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-social-signal"]
    }
  }
}

The local process can also be started with npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-social-signal. No Pipeworx account is required for the standalone mode or for the first hosted calls described in the documentation.

Tools and capabilities

• social_topic_volume(...): returns topic post counts over time, bucketed across Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, and Hacker News.
• social_account_activity(...): returns posting cadence and engagement for an account on Bluesky or Mastodon.
• ask_pipeworx: on gateway connections, accepts a plain-language question and routes it to an appropriate tool.
• HTTP access: invokes tools without an MCP client by sending JSON to the gateway API.

Limitations and notes

The Social Signal MCP server measures a partial slice of social activity. Its output should not be read as total social volume because X/Twitter is absent and the four covered networks have different search behavior and availability.

An unavailable network returns null for its buckets, while a measured bucket with no matching results can represent zero. This distinction is especially relevant for Mastodon, which may be unreachable from Cloudflare egress. The hosted pack endpoint currently includes shared gateway schemas in addition to the pack tools; its initialize response is the authoritative source for the exact tool scope at connection time.

The project is licensed under MIT.