Lemmy Scraper

Lemmy Scraper: posts from any instance, by feed, community or keyword

Give it a Lemmy host and a mode, and it reads the public API and hands back posts. Title, the markdown body, the external link, author, community, score, upvotes, downvotes, comment count and the thread permalink, one row each.

The host is the first choice you make here, not an afterthought. Every Lemmy server holds only what it has federated in, so the same community asked on two hosts comes back different, and a small server has seen less of the network than a large one.

🔍 What Lemmy Scraper does

Three modes off the same host. feed reads the instance front page. community reads one community, either bare like technology or fully qualified like [email protected] when the community lives on another server. search runs the instance's own keyword search.

It pages 50 posts at a time until it has the number you asked for or the instance runs out, deduplicates on post id inside the run, and stops early when a page comes back short.

One host per run. If you want three instances, that is three runs.

📥 What you give it

{
  "instance": "lemmy.world",
  "mode": "community",
  "query": "technology",
  "sort": "TopWeek",
  "maxItems": 200
}

query is required in community and search mode. Leave it out and the run returns a BAD_INPUT row instead of posts.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run, trimmed where the image URLs run long:

{
  "ok": true,
  "id": 51894672,
  "title": "*69",
  "url": "https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/b3fc49f0-cf9a-...jpeg",
  "body": null,
  "author": "Track_Shovel",
  "authorActor": "https://slrpnk.net/u/Track_Shovel",
  "community": "lemmyshitpost",
  "communityTitle": "Lemmy Shitpost",
  "score": 36,
  "comments": 2,
  "upvotes": 37,
  "downvotes": 1,
  "nsfw": false,
  "thumbnail": "https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7149d061-8120-...jpeg",
  "published": "2026-09-14T04:48:43.513395Z",
  "postUrl": "https://lemmy.world/post/51894672"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Two kinds of row land in your dataset.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Lemmy Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Leave Lemmy instance at lemmy.world, or type another host. 3. Pick a Mode, and fill in Query unless you chose the front-page feed. 4. Set Max posts. Start around 20 to see the shape of the output, then click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$1.50 per 1,000 posts. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay for posts delivered. Duplicates dropped inside the run and diagnostic rows are not charged, and a search that finds nothing costs you nothing.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching one community on a schedule with sort set to New, and diffing each run against the

one before it.

• Reading what actually got traction in a niche community last month with TopMonth, where score

next to comments separates what people upvoted from what they argued about.

• Keyword monitoring, with realistic expectations. Lemmy is small, so you get genuine mentions and

not many of them.

• Filing a community's posts into Notion as pages, straight off the run.

🚧 What it does not do

• No comment text. You get comments as a count and nothing else.
• One host per run. Comparing instances means one run each.
• You see only what the host has federated in. A server that has defederated from another will

not show you its posts, and a small server has simply seen fewer of them.

• Search ranking belongs to the instance, and this actor does not re-order it.
• 1,000 posts per run is the hard ceiling, whatever the community holds.
• If a page fails partway through a long run, the run ends with a diagnostic row rather than the

posts it had already collected. Re-run it, ideally with a smaller maxItems.

• Public posts only. No logins, nothing private, nothing already removed.

🧭 Which social scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Lemmy account? No. The API this reads is public and there is nothing to sign up for.

Which instance should I pick? The one whose community you actually want. For a community hosted elsewhere, use the qualified name@host form so the server you are asking knows where to look.

Why did the same search give different answers on two hosts? Because each holds a different slice of the network. That is federation working normally, not a fault in the run.

Can I schedule it? Yes, like any Apify actor. sort on New with a small maxItems makes a cheap hourly watch.

Can I get the comments too? Not from this one. Only the count comes back.

Is scraping Lemmy posts legal? These are public posts on public instances. They still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good place to start, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the instance, the mode and the run ID. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually names the problem on its own.