Reddit MCP Server

Give your AI assistant a live, structured window into Reddit — zero API keys required.

Reddit MCP Server is an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects AI assistants (Claude, Cursor, Open WebUI, and more) to Reddit’s content in real time. It provides structured tools for searching discussions, extracting community opinions, and tracking niche trends — with a resilient multi-tier fallback engine that works even without any credentials.

# Get started in one command — no sign-up, no API keys
uvx reddit-mcp-ai

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🗺️ How it Works (Data Flow Sequence)

Here is a visual sequence diagram showing how the AI model interacts with this server, including our Zero-Config Fallback system:

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    actor AI as AI Assistant (Claude/Cursor)
    participant MCP as FastMCP Server (STDIO)
    participant Tools as Application Tools
    participant Reddit as Reddit API (OAuth)
    participant Fallback as DDG & Arctic Shift

    AI->>MCP: Request (e.g., search_knowledge)
    MCP->>Tools: Route request
    Tools->>Reddit: Attempt Fetch (Resilient HTTP)
    alt Has OAuth Credentials & API Healthy
        Note over Reddit,Tools: Handles 429 (Rate Limits) with Retry-After backoff!
        Reddit-->>Tools: Return Official JSON payload
    else Zero-Config OR Reddit API Fails
        Note over Tools,Fallback: Graceful Degradation Active
        Tools->>Fallback: Execute Search / Fetch Archive
        Fallback-->>Tools: Return Alternative JSON payload
    end
    Tools->>Tools: Refine comments (filter bots & short noise)
    Tools-->>MCP: Map to Domain Models (Pydantic)
    MCP-->>AI: Return clean JSON-RPC Response (stdout-safe)

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✨ Features

• 🚀 Zero-Config Ready: Works completely out of the box. No Reddit API keys required — it falls back automatically to DuckDuckGo and the Arctic Shift archive.
• 🛡️ Cascading Multi-Tier Engine: Official OAuth → Session Cookie → Browser-Impersonated JSON → Arctic Shift RSS → DDG. The AI always gets data, even when Reddit is rate-limiting or credentials are missing.
• 🚦 Built-in Anti-Ban Shields: Token bucket rate limiter, global concurrency semaphore, and singleflight request coalescing prevent WAF 403 blocks and IP bans under heavy AI traffic.