Lemmy Scraper — Posts, Comments, Communities & Search

Scrape Lemmy (any instance) using the official public REST API v3 — no account, no API key, no proxy spend required. Lemmy is the federated, open-source Reddit alternative; point this actor at lemmy.world (default, largest) or any other instance.

What it does

• Feed — a site-wide post feed by sort (Active/Hot/New/TopDay…) and listing type (All federated feed or Local only)
• Community — pull posts from any named community, e.g. technology or technology@lemmy.world, across many communities in one run
• Comments — recent comments site-wide or scoped to specific communities
• Search — find communities, posts, users, or comments by keyword (or All at once)
• Unified output — posts, comments, communities and users in one dataset with consistent field names, ready for analysis or AI pipelines

Why use this actor

Competitor actor	Problem	This actor
Single-community Lemmy scrapers	One community per run — instance-wide needs many runs	Site-wide feed + multi-community + comments + search in one
Post-only scrapers	No comments, no community/user discovery	Posts + comments + communities + users
Roll-your-own API calls	Cursor vs page pagination, view-object flattening, charge logic to maintain	One input, clean flat schema, pay per result

The Fediverse is a fast-growing, open social network. Lemmy in particular is the leading federated Reddit alternative — a natural input for social listening, brand monitoring, academic research, and RAG pipelines that want public discourse without platform lock-in or API keys.

Output fields

Posts (type: "post"): id, ap_id, title, body, external_url, thumbnail_url, embed_title, embed_description, published, updated, nsfw, locked, featured_community, featured_local, language_id, score, upvotes, downvotes, comments_count, newest_comment_time, community_id, community_name, community_title, community_actor_id, creator_id, creator_name, creator_display_name, creator_actor_id, creator_instance_id

Comments (type: "comment"): id, ap_id, content, path, published, updated, distinguished, language_id, score, upvotes, downvotes, child_count, post_id, post_title, community_id, community_name, community_actor_id, creator_id, creator_name, creator_display_name, creator_actor_id

Communities (type: "community"): id, name, title, actor_id, description, published, nsfw, posting_restricted_to_mods, instance_id, icon, banner, subscribers, posts_count, comments_count, users_active_day, users_active_week, users_active_month, users_active_half_year

Users (type: "user"): id, name, display_name, actor_id, bio, published, banned, bot_account, instance_id, avatar, banner, matrix_user_id, post_count, comment_count

Usage examples

Site-wide hot feed:

{ "mode": "feed", "instance": "lemmy.world", "postSort": "Hot", "listingType": "All", "maxResultsPerTerm": 500 }

Posts from two communities:

{
  "mode": "community",
  "instance": "lemmy.world",
  "communities": ["technology", "selfhosted@lemmy.world"],
  "postSort": "TopWeek",
  "maxResultsPerTerm": 300
}

Recent comments in a community:

{ "mode": "comments", "communities": ["technology"], "commentSort": "New", "maxResultsPerTerm": 200 }

Find communities about a topic:

{ "mode": "search", "searchTerms": ["selfhosted", "privacy"], "searchType": "Communities" }

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.003 per result.

Example: 5,000 items ≈ $15.

Technical notes

• Uses each instance's official Lemmy REST API v3 (/post/list, /comment/list, /search) — free, public, no key
• Zero proxy cost — official API, no anti-bot bypass
• Handles both pagination models for you: /post/list uses opaque cursor pagination (next_page → page_cursor), while /comment/list and /search use classic 1-indexed page
• Polite rate limiting between pages
• Automatically stops when the user's spending limit is reached — charge respected per result, no overrun

Honest scope / limits

• Feed / community post ordering honors Lemmy's server-side sort; Top* windows are relative to run time (snapshot, not live).
• Comments mode returns comments as a flat list with a path field (materialized tree position) — reconstruct threads client-side from path if needed.
• Search depends on what the chosen instance has federated and indexed; a term may return fewer rows on a small instance than on lemmy.world.
• Snapshot at run time; schedule recurring runs for live updates.

Common use cases

• Social listening / brand monitoring — track a community or keyword across the Fediverse
• RAG pipelines — feed fresh, open public discourse into retrieval systems
• Community discovery — find and rank Lemmy communities by activity/subscribers for a topic
• Academic / network research — collect public posts, comments and community metadata at scale

Data compliance

This actor accesses only public Lemmy data through each instance's official, publicly documented REST API. No login credentials are used. Public posts, comments and communities are intentionally public; suitable for research and business use. Respect each instance's terms and the authors' content.