Any search tool can return today's threads. Putting year-old discussion beside recent discussion shows you something a single snapshot cannot — that a question which was a flame war has become a pragmatic one, or that an old consensus quietly reversed. The other well-judged decision is that everything works with no keys: the routing has four tiers and each one degrades into the next, so a missing LLM key costs you precision rather than function. Sources include unmoderated boards, which is the point and also the caveat.
An MCP server and CLI that searches public discussion across nine platforms and returns opinions rather than documentation. Queries are routed to the right communities by a four-tier system, and the whole thing works with no API keys at all — an optional LLM key only makes the routing smarter.
- All platforms searched for opinions on a topic in one call — `search_opinions`
- Then vs Now: historical and recent discussion side by side, which is how you see a consensus change rather than a snapshot of today — `search_opinions_perspective`
- One thread's comments read in depth once you have found it — `get_thread_opinions`
- Which platforms are available and healthy right now — `list_available_platforms`
- Direct control when you know where to look: a `routing_hints` parameter takes explicit targets such as specific subreddits, boards and Stack Exchange sites, and the automatic routing handles it when you leave it out
- Nine sources, each through a public interface: HackerNews via Algolia, Reddit through Pullpush with Arctic Shift and Redlib fallbacks, 4chan's official JSON API, Stack Exchange's API across 180+ communities, Telegram public channel previews, Lobsters, Lemmy's federated REST API, LessWrong's GraphQL API, and XenForo forums by scraping
- Routing that degrades gracefully: an LLM query rewrite if you supply a key, semantic embeddings with a 33MB local model if you do not, and a broad default under that — with a dynamic catalog covering 77 4chan boards and 180 Stack Exchange sites
No tokens, no OAuth. The README's install line names `vox-pop`, which PyPI does not have. All nine platforms work immediately once it is in place; the client entry runs `python` against the `vox_pop.server` module. Python 3.10+. An optional LLM key — Anthropic, OpenAI or a local Ollama — enables the query-rewrite tier of routing, and the embedding tier runs locally with no key. There is also a CLI (`vox-pop search`, with `--perspective`, `--platforms` and `--limit`) and a Python API for embedding it in your own tools. MIT licensed.