Lobsters Scraper — Tech Stories & Tags

Scrape stories from Lobsters (lobste.rs), the computing-focused link-aggregation community, as clean, structured data. Pull the Hottest or Newest feed, or filter by tag — and get one row per story with title, link, score, comment count, submitter, tags and description. Export to JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull straight from the API.

Perfect for tech news monitoring, trend and topic tracking, content curation, developer research, and building link datasets for dashboards or LLMs.

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What you get

One flat, ready-to-use record per story:

Field	Description
shortId	Lobsters story ID
title	Story title
url	The linked article
lobstersUrl / commentsUrl	Lobsters page and comments
score	Story score / upvotes
commentCount	Number of comments
submitter	Who submitted it
tags	Story tags
description	Submitter's description (plain text)
createdAt	When it was posted (ISO 8601)
source	Feed or tag it came from
collectedAt	When the row was scraped

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How to use

{
  "feed": "hottest",
  "tags": ["rust", "security"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

• Feed — Hottest or Newest (used when no tags are set).
• Tags — filter by one or more Lobsters tags (e.g. programming, ai, security).
• Max stories — cap the total (0 = no limit; the scraper pages through the feed).

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Example output

{
  "shortId": "abc123",
  "title": "Thoughts on the Future of Browsers",
  "url": "https://example.com/browsers",
  "lobstersUrl": "https://lobste.rs/s/abc123",
  "score": 46,
  "commentCount": 20,
  "submitter": "orib",
  "tags": ["browsers"],
  "createdAt": "2026-09-20T14:00:00.000-05:00",
  "collectedAt": "2026-09-20T16:40:00.000Z"
}

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Common use cases

• Tech news monitoring — track what's trending in computing and security.
• Topic & tag tracking — follow specific tags over time.
• Content curation — build clean digests of the best stories.
• Developer research — mine links, discussions and scores.
• Datasets — build structured link datasets for analysis or model training.

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Frequently asked questions

Do I need any login, account or key? No. Just pick a feed or tags and run.

Can I filter by topic? Yes — add Lobsters tags like rust, programming or security.

How many stories can I get? Set Max stories to whatever you need (0 = no limit) — the scraper pages through the feed.

What format is the data? A flat table you can export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or fetch from the Apify API.

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Related scrapers

Building a tech-content toolkit? Pair this with our Hacker News scraper and DEV.to scraper — all with the same clean, one-row-per-item output.