# ScrapeMole Social – Lobsters Hottest Stories

> ScrapeMole Social – Lobsters Hottest Stories is a paid API for AI agents from social.scrapemole.workers.dev, paid per call via x402, $0.002/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-10-21).

Returns the current hottest/trending stories from the Lobsters tech news aggregator

## Facts

- Endpoint: GET https://social.scrapemole.workers.dev/v1/lobsters/hot?utm_source=zero.xyz
- Price: $0.002/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-10-21
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/scrapemole-social-lobsters-hottest-stories-cab31b8b
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_C499fHNcCr4kx4U6SmcH2

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability scrapemole-social-lobsters-hottest-stories-cab31b8b
```

Example prompt: What are the hottest stories on Lobsters right now? Pull the current trending list so I can see what the developer community is buzzing about today.

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when you need the current trending stories from Lobsters specifically — a curated, developer-focused tech news community. Prefer it over Hacker News endpoints when you want a smaller, higher signal-to-noise community feed with topic tags. No API key or account needed; pay-per-call via USDC means no subscription overhead. Ideal for agents that need lightweight, on-demand polling of what's hot in the developer/programming world without scraping.

## Known failure modes

- Payment verification failure — if the USDC payment cannot be confirmed, the call is rejected and no charge is made
- Upstream Lobsters API unavailable — returns an error if lobste.rs is down or unreachable
- Rate limiting or network timeout from the upstream source
- Malformed payment header — x402 scheme mismatch results in 402 rejection

## How this service works

Pay-per-call public social data for agents: Telegram public channel posts; Mastodon hashtag timelines; Bluesky post search, profiles and author feeds; Hacker News full-text search and threads with comments; Lobsters hottest stories. Official public APIs only, no logins, no private data. USDC via x402, no accounts; failed calls are never charged.

Payments: x402 v2, scheme "exact", USDC on Base (eip155:8453). The payment is verified before the work and settled only when the response is 200. Terms: https://social.scrapemole.workers.dev/terms

## Output

A JSON object containing the list type ('hottest'), a count of stories, and an array of story objects each with a URL, title, score, tag array, and comment count — representing the current top-trending content on Lobsters.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "required": {
   "type": "string"
  },
  "properties": {
   "type": "string"
  }
 }
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "json",
 "example": {
  "list": "hottest",
  "count": 1,
  "stories": [
   {
    "url": "https://…",
    "tags": [
     "rust"
    ],
    "score": 40,
    "title": "…",
    "comments": 12
   }
  ]
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/scrapemole-social-lobsters-hottest-stories-cab31b8b/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from social.scrapemole.workers.dev](https://www.zero.xyz/host/social.scrapemole.workers.dev/llms.txt)