Lemmy scraper - posts, comments, communities and users

Scrape public data from any Lemmy instance without a login, an API key, or a captcha. Lemmy is the largest federated Reddit alternative, and this scraper turns a keyword, a community, a user, or an instance feed into clean, structured rows you can export to CSV, JSON, or Excel.

Use it for community monitoring, brand and topic mention tracking, content aggregation, fediverse research, and lead discovery across the open social web.

What it does

Point it at an instance such as lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, or sh.itjust.works and it reads the documented /api/v3 endpoints. It handles pagination, retries, rate limiting, and federated content from across the fediverse.

Four ways to run it, picked automatically from your input:

• Communities: give one or more communities as name@instance (for example technology@lemmy.world) and get their posts, or switch the result type to comments. Each run also returns the community record with subscriber and activity counts.
• Users: give one or more accounts as name@instance and get each profile plus that user's recent posts and comments.
• Search: give a keyword and get matching posts, comments, communities, or users from across the instance.
• Feed: leave the filters empty and get the instance's public post feed.

Priority when several inputs are set: users, then communities, then search, then the feed.

Input

Field	Description
instance	Lemmy instance host, e.g. lemmy.world. Default lemmy.world.
communities	List of communities as name@instance.
usernames	List of users as name@instance. Takes priority over communities and search.
searchQuery	Keyword(s) to search across the instance.
resultType	Posts, Comments, Communities, or Users. Filters search; switches posts/comments in community mode.
sort	Active, Hot, New, Old, Top day/week/month/year/all, Most comments, New comments.
listingType	All (federated) or Local.
includeUserContent	User mode: also return each user's recent posts and comments.
maxItems	Cap on returned rows.
requestDelaySeconds	Pause between requests. Default 0.5.
proxyConfiguration	Optional. The API is public, so a proxy is rarely needed.

Output

One flat row per item with a type of post, comment, community, or user. Posts and comments carry the author and community, engagement counts, timestamps, and permalinks. Community rows carry subscriber and active-user counts. User rows carry the bio, avatar, account age, post and comment counts, and any Matrix contact listed on the profile.

Example post row:

{
  "type": "post",
  "instance": "lemmy.world",
  "postId": "49722402",
  "title": "Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit",
  "linkUrl": "https://www.theregister.com/...",
  "permalink": "https://lemmy.world/post/49722402",
  "score": 214,
  "comments": 37,
  "communityName": "privacy",
  "communityInstance": "lemmy.world",
  "creatorUsername": "someuser",
  "creatorInstance": "lemmy.world",
  "published": "2026-07-21T09:14:00Z"
}

Notes

Only public data is read, through Lemmy's own API. There is no login and no scraping of private or moderator-only content. Be reasonable with request rates and respect each instance's rules.