Looking for a social-media platform with accessible APIs for post-analysis (patterns, engagement, colors, timing)

Questions
1

Hi everyone,
For a university project, we’re trying to analyze success factors in social media posts (engagement, posting time, colors in images, topics, hashtags, etc.).
Our main challenge: getting enough data through the APIs.

Instagram: Graph API is very restrictive (Business account, Facebook Page, App Review) and only gives meaningful access to our own accounts.

Twitter/X: Free tier returns too little data; useful read access only available in expensive paid tiers.
So our bottleneck is simply data access.

Question:
Which platforms currently offer realistic, affordable API access to public post data (text + engagement + ideally image thumbnails) for research purposes?
We’re considering:
Reddit
YouTube
Mastodon / open networks
Pinterest / Tumblr
Or any platform with accessible public data
Any recommendations, experiences, or alternatives (e.g., open datasets) would be extremely helpful.
Thanks in advance!

2

Reddit API is your best bet—free tier gives decent public post access including text, engagement metrics, and image URLs. Use the JSON endpoints or official API with OAuth for higher limits.

YouTube Data API v3 works well for video metadata and engagement stats, though image analysis is limited to thumbnails. Mastodon instances often have open APIs with no authentication needed for public posts.

Avoid Pinterest and Tumblr—both have restrictive or deprecated APIs. Consider scraping public RSS feeds or using existing datasets from Kaggle or academic sources if API limits are too tight.