Social-Media-OSINT: a curated map of where a username can be looked up

A directory, not a tool, and what that means for how you use it

The Social-Media-OSINT repository is described as a social media OSINT collection containing tools, techniques and tradecraft, and the repository itself contains exactly one file, README.md. There is no code to run, no package to install and no configuration. The entire artefact is a structured list of links, grouped by platform, each with a one line description of what the linked service does.

That framing matters because it changes what you should expect. A directory like this is a map, and a map is only as good as its survey. The value is not that any single entry does something you cannot do elsewhere, it is that the entries are gathered in one place, sorted by platform, and each has a stated purpose, so you can work through a list of candidate places to look for a person rather than guessing which networks to try.

The platform coverage is broad, and the topic tags list them: bluesky, dating-app, discord, facebook, instagram, kik, linkedin, mastodon, reddit, session, signal, skype, snapchat, social-media, social-network, tiktok, twitter, whatsapp and x. The README's own framing explains the scope decision, noting that the distinction between traditional social media and messenger apps is probably not as defined as it once was, and quoting the definition of social media as interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. As a result, on this page you find some platforms that you may not think of as social media.

The section headings in the README make that explicit. There are sections for the mainstream networks, and then separate ones for Messenger Apps and Dating Apps, and the Miscellaneous section collects things that do not belong to one platform: Add-Me Contacts, described as an online directory of user contacts, Comment Picker, a multi purpose tool for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, Export Comments, which easily exports all comments from your social media posts to an Excel file, HuntIntel, to find social media posts surrounding a location, Google Social Search, a top social networks search results dashboard, Open Measures, to analyze hate and disinformation online, Recruit'em, which uses AI to build Boolean searches and source candidates on LinkedIn, X, XING, Stackoverflow and GitHub, and Social Media List, a list of the top 250 social media apps and networks worldwide.

There is also a Social Media Map for navigating the ever-changing world of social, The Hive Index with curated lists of top online social media communities to join, Waybien for WhatsApp group search to find Facebook, Discord and Telegram channels, and the Mobile First list of alternative and advanced tools for enhancing social media experiences.

The scale of the Miscellaneous section is the point. A single-platform tool tells you about one platform, and a directory of directories tells you what kinds of question exist.

The search operator convention, which is the part worth stealing

The most reusable idea in this repository is in the SM Management section, and it is a formatting convention rather than a tool.

Each entry gives a service and a URL pattern with the same placeholder, so the same query can be pasted into all of them. Beacons is beacons.ai/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Gravatar is en.gravatar.com/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Keybase is keybase.io/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Linkin Bio is linkin.bio/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Linktree is linktr.ee/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Many Bio is many.bio/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Smart Bio is smart.bio/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Snipfeed is snipfeed.co/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Shorby is shor.by/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD. Stan is stan.store/USERNAME or site: and KEYWORD.

So each link supports two query shapes. The direct one substitutes a username into the path, and the second hands the domain to a search engine with a keyword, using the site: operator to restrict the search to that domain. The second form matters more than it looks, because a link-in-bio page is often indexed by search engines even when it is not reachable by guessing a username, so the fallback covers a case the direct URL does not.

The reason this section exists at all is worth understanding. Link-in-bio services are where people publish their other accounts, so a target with a link-in-bio page is a person with a presence on several networks. Searching one such service is a multiplier on every other lookup you do, which is why the section collects them together rather than scattering them across the platform sections.

The convention is also easy to extend. If you know of a service in this family, adding a row is a single line in the same shape, and the resulting list is still uniform enough to work with. That is a good property for a resource list: it can grow without fragmenting.

The Bluesky section works the same way, as a flat list of tools for that platform, including an awesome list of Bluesky resources, the Bluesky Directory starter packs, Clearsky, DeckBlue, GoodFeeds, Graphtracks, Hoaxy for visualising how information spreads on social networks, Internect Info, and Wolfgang.

And the Discord section is the largest in the visible portion of the file, and it is a catalogue of server directories and lookup tools: Disboard, Discadia, Discord Bee, Discord Bot List, Discord Bots on the bots.gg domain, Discord Centre, the Discord.com server search, a Discord History Tracker, Discord Hub with its user search, a Discord ID creation date checker, Discord ID Lookup, Discord Servers, Discord Status Checker, Discords profile search, the Doxcord project, and Dsc for exploring over 200k existing dsc.gg links.

The Discord count is the observation worth carrying forward. A platform with a large public server directory ecosystem produces a large number of independent lookup tools, and a directory that names them is saving you the search.

The Telegram split, and why it was made

One decision in this repository is a design decision rather than a listing, and it is worth understanding because it sets a boundary for the whole project.

The README says: if you are looking for Telegram, I decided that it should have its own repository, as it was quite a large section. The link points to cqcore/Telegram-OSINT.

So the split is by size, not by principle, and that tells you something about the shape of the resource. The sections in the main repository are the ones that fit within a single readable file, and Telegram was the one that did not. The topics list in the repository metadata does not include telegram, which confirms the split rather than contradicting it.

That matters for anyone using the collection, because the boundary is arbitrary from the user's point of view. Telegram is a messaging app like Signal, Skype, WhatsApp and Kik, and the Messenger Apps section covers the other messaging platforms. So the split does not correspond to a category in the taxonomy; it corresponds to how much material there was.

The Messenger Apps section in the visible portion of the README is where the messaging platforms live, and the topics list includes signal, skype, whatsapp, session and kik alongside the social networks, and there is a separate section for dating apps with its own anchor.

The dating apps section is worth noting as a deliberate inclusion. Dating apps are where people are encouraged to share a great deal of personal information, and they are also where a username search has a particular value, since the profile is often public. The topic tags include dating-app, which means it was a deliberate scope decision rather than an accident of what turned up while collecting.

The sessions listed in the topics, session, refers to the Session messenger, an app built on the Signal protocol. It sits in the messaging group rather than the social group, which is the same taxonomy question the README opens with: the line between a social network and a messenger has blurred, and the author resolved it by including both and letting the section headings do the sorting.

For a user, the practical takeaway is that the Telegram material is elsewhere, and that a single-page index of this kind will keep growing past what one file can hold, so expect the split pattern to repeat.

The platform sections, and what a single-platform list actually gives you

The bulk of the repository is the platform sections, and reading one of them closely tells you what a list of that kind is worth.

The Discord section is the largest in the visible portion of the file, and its shape is revealing. It is a catalogue of server directories and lookup tools rather than a set of analysis tools: Disboard, Discadia, Discord Bee, Discord Bot List, Discord Bots on the bots.gg domain, Discord Centre, the Discord.com server search, a Discord History Tracker, Discord Hub with its user search, a Discord ID creation date checker, Discord ID Lookup, Discord Servers, Discord Status Checker, Discords profile search, the Doxcord project, and Dsc for exploring over 200k existing dsc.gg links.

Three different kinds of thing are mixed together there. A server directory like Disboard is a search index of public servers, which is useful when you are looking for communities rather than people. An identifier lookup like the Discord ID creation date checker tells you when an account was made, which is a fact about the account rather than about its content. And Doxcord is a tool, listed among the directories because it operates on the same public data.

The Bluesky section is a much shorter list, and it is a different mix again: an awesome list of Bluesky resources, the Bluesky Directory starter packs, Clearsky, DeckBlue, GoodFeeds, Graphtracks, Hoaxy for visualising how information spreads on social networks, Internect Info, and Wolfgang.

Hoaxy deserves a note because it is the one entry in the visible list that is about a research question rather than a lookup. Visualising how information spreads is a different kind of tool from finding an account, and it is the kind of thing a link list is genuinely good at surfacing because the tool is likely unfamiliar.

The remaining platform sections, for Facebook, Instagram, Kik, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Reddit, Skype, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter X and WhatsApp, follow the same pattern and are not visible in the excerpt, so there is nothing to say about their specific contents.

What can be said about them generally is that the ordering of the section headings follows the alphabetical order of the platform names, and the anchor identifiers match them, which means the anchors are stable enough to link to. That matters for a document that other people link into, and it is a small sign that the structure is being maintained rather than appended to.

The topic tags cover the same ground as the sections, plus two entries that are worth pausing on. The tag session refers to the Session messenger, and it is listed alongside signal, skype, whatsapp and kik rather than with the social networks, which is the taxonomy decision the README opens with. And the tag x is listed separately from twitter, which reflects the platform rename and the fact that the section heading is written Twitter X.

The limits of a link list, and how to use one without wasting an afternoon

A directory of third party links has a specific failure mode, and it is worth planning around rather than discovering.

The failure mode is rot. A link that pointed at a working tool in 2021 may be dead, may have changed purpose, or may now be a different product with the same name, and nothing in a README can tell you which. The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-07-12, so it is being maintained, but the links in any given section point at services the project does not control.

The second failure mode is that a link tells you a service exists but not whether it is legitimate. Some entries in the visible listing are large commercial platforms and some are small independent projects, and the descriptions are one line each, so a user has to make their own judgement about whether a service is worth handing a username to. That is not a criticism of the collection, it is the nature of the artefact, and it is the reason an experienced analyst treats a list of lookups as leads rather than as results.

Given that, the way to use the repository well is to treat the platform sections as a checklist rather than a search. Pick a platform, work the list of services for it, and move on. The Miscellaneous section is the exception, because those tools are not per platform and are useful in their own right: Export Comments producing a spreadsheet of comments from your own posts is a reporting tool, Open Measures analysing hate and disinformation is a research tool, and Recruit'em building Boolean searches for candidate sourcing is a recruitment workflow tool. Those you run, rather than browse.

The SM Management section is best used as a first pass. The link-in-bio services are cheap to check and tell you which networks a target is on, and from there the platform sections become targeted rather than scattershot.

There is also a value in the parts that are not tools at all. Social Media List, described as a list of the top 250 social media apps and networks worldwide, and The Hive Index with its curated lists of communities to join, are both inputs to the coverage question, and the Social Media Map exists for the same reason. For an investigation that begins with a vague idea of where a person might be, knowing that the platform landscape has changed recently is a genuine head start, and no individual tool gives you that.

The metadata reflects the low ceremony of the project. The primary language is not recorded, the licence is recorded as unknown, and there are no GitHub releases, which for a single file of links is entirely reasonable. The one thing to check before you rely on it is the licence file, since the repository has none in the top level listing, and a collection of links raises a question about whether the author has the right to list every one of those services.

Editorial conclusion

Social-Media-OSINT fits an analyst or journalist who needs a starting map of where a username, a keyword or a profile picture might lead, and who can verify each link before relying on it. It is the wrong tool if you need a tool that does the collection, because nothing here collects anything, and it is the wrong choice for anything operational, since a directory of search endpoints is not a workflow. Before relying on any of it, check each link still resolves, because the value of a directory is entirely in the links being live, and read the Telegram-OSINT repository separately, since the author split it out for size rather than by platform.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. README
3. The-Osint-Toolbox/Social-Media-OSINT on GitHub