Lemmy Scraper

Scrape public posts from any Lemmy instance — the federated, Reddit-style link aggregator. Browse an instance's front-page feed, pull a single community, or search by keyword. No account, no API key, no login.

Uses the public Lemmy v3 REST API, so reads are fast and clean (structured JSON, not HTML scraping).

Modes

• Feed — the instance front page (/api/v3/post/list). Just set instance and sort.
• Community — one community's posts. Set mode: "community" and put the community name in query (e.g. technology, or cross-instance technology@lemmy.world).
• Search — search posts by keyword. Set mode: "search" and put the term in query (e.g. linux).

What you get per post

id, title, url (the external link the post points to, if any), body (post text; markdown, with stray HTML stripped), author, authorActor (the creator's federated actor URL), community, communityTitle, score, comments, upvotes, downvotes, nsfw, thumbnail, published (ISO), and postUrl (the permalink on the instance, e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/123).

Fields that can be null

• url / thumbnail — many posts are pure text discussions with no external link or image.
• body — link posts often have no body text.
• Any field Lemmy omits for a given post comes back null rather than being dropped.

Input

Field	Notes
instance	Lemmy instance host (bare domain). Default lemmy.world.
mode	feed, community, or search. Default feed.
query	Community name (community mode) or search term (search mode).
sort	Hot, Active, New, TopDay, TopWeek, TopMonth, TopAll. Default Hot.
maxItems	Max posts to return (paginated 50 at a time). Default 100.

Output

One dataset row per post, deduped by post id. Pricing is pay-per-result: you are only charged for genuine post rows (ok: true). Rows we couldn't deliver are never charged:

• invalid input — a single ok: false diagnostic row with errorCode: "BAD_INPUT" (bad instance, bad mode, or a missing community name / search term),
• no posts for this feed/community/search (NO_RESULTS),
• a missing community or non-Lemmy host (NOT_FOUND),
• rate limits or network errors (RATE_LIMITED / NETWORK).

Proxy

The Lemmy v3 REST API is public and has no anti-bot, so no proxy is required and the default runs without one (saving proxy credits). Only enable Apify Proxy if an instance rate-limits your IP at very high volume.

Troubleshooting

• NOT_FOUND in community mode? Check the community name. If it lives on another instance, use the cross-instance form name@otherinstance.tld, or set instance to that instance directly.
• NO_RESULTS? The feed/community/search genuinely returned nothing on this instance — try a different sort, a broader search term, or a larger instance.
• BAD_INPUT? community and search modes both require query. instance must be a bare Lemmy domain like lemmy.world.

Example

{ "instance": "lemmy.world", "mode": "community", "query": "technology", "sort": "Hot", "maxItems": 50 }

Notes

Lemmy is federated: a large instance like lemmy.world also relays content from communities hosted elsewhere. The postUrl permalink points to the instance you scraped; authorActor and the community's federated identity tell you where the content originates.