Lemmy Scraper - Posts, Comments & Communities

Scrape public Lemmy communities on any instance via the official /api/v3: posts with score and comment counts, threaded comments, community stats and post search. Since-date for incremental runs. The Reddit-alternative data source, no login or proxy.

What does this Actor do?

Lemmy is the leading open-source, federated Reddit alternative, with large communities on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, programming.dev and hundreds of other servers. This Actor uses Lemmy's official /api/v3 to export posts, threaded comments and community statistics from any public instance - no login, no API key and no browser.

Key features:

• Plain HTTP against official public endpoints - no browser, no proxy, no login, runs on 128 MB memory.
• Pay only for results: one charge per row saved; your maximum charge per run is always respected.
• maxItems hard cap (default 100) and bounded pagination - runs can never loop forever.
• Incremental mode via a since-date so scheduled runs only fetch new data.
• Polite rate limiting, retries with exponential backoff and Retry-After support.
• Clean, flat, consistently named JSON fields ready for Excel, Google Sheets, BigQuery or your API.

Who is it for?

• Community and brand monitoring - track mentions in technology, privacy, gaming or self-hosting communities.
• Market and product research - mine discussions for pain points and feature requests.
• NLP datasets - collect posts and comments with scores for sentiment and ranking models.
• Moderation and analytics - measure community growth, activity and engagement over time.
• Reddit-to-fediverse comparison - collect the same topics across platforms.

How it works

For each community the Actor reads /community for stats (a free metadata row), then pages through /post/list 50 posts at a time (supporting both page numbers and the newer cursor pagination). With comments enabled it calls /comment/list per post. All requests are spaced, retried on 429/5xx, deduplicated, and bounded by page limits. With sort: New plus sinceDate, it stops as soon as older posts appear.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
instance	string	"lemmy.world"	Lemmy server domain, e.g. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, programming.dev.
communities	array	-	name, name@instance or community URL.
postUrls	array	[]	Individual posts to fetch.
searchQueries	array	[]	Full-text post search across the instance's known content.
sort	string	"New"	New is required for since-date early stop.
maxItems	integer	100	Hard cap on posts saved and charged.
maxPostsPerCommunity	integer	0	0 = no per-community cap.
includeComments	boolean	false	Fetch comments for each post (charged as 'comment').
maxCommentsPerPost	integer	20	Max comments per post
includeCommunityInfo	boolean	true	Free metadata row per community (subscribers, activity).
sinceDate	string	-	ISO date/time.
delayMs	integer	800	Delay between requests (ms)

Example input

{
  "instance": "lemmy.world",
  "communities": [
    "technology",
    "selfhosted@lemmy.world"
  ],
  "sort": "New",
  "maxItems": 200,
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 10,
  "sinceDate": "2026-10-20"
}

Output

Each result is one row in the default dataset. You can download it as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML, or read it through the Apify API. A real row from a test run on 26 October 2026:

{
  "type": "post",
  "postId": 53586255,
  "title": "ChatGPT Is Building Detailed Psychological Profiles of Its Users:  system is acting as your advisor, your friend, your doctor, your lawyer, and so it has information on everything.",
  "url": "https://lemmy.world/post/53586255",
  "linkUrl": "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-building-profiles-users",
  "body": null,
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f7b8323a-aab7-4757-98a3-4b88b931b1dd.jpeg",
  "nsfw": false,
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-25T18:48:12.361096Z",
  "updatedAt": null,
  "score": 66,
  "upvotes": 67,
  "downvotes": 1,
  "commentCount": 14,
  "community": "technology@lemmy.world",
  "communityTitle": "Technology",
  "author": "eicker@lemmy.world",
  "authorIsBot": false,
  "locked": false,
  "featured": false,
  "instance": "lemmy.world",
  "source": "community:technology"
}

Tips

• Communities from other servers can be addressed as name@server through the instance you choose.
• Use sort: TopWeek for a weekly best-of digest.
• Comments include depth and parentId so you can rebuild threads.
• Keep includeComments off when you only need headlines - it is much cheaper.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing: about $0.50 per 1,000 posts and $0.25 per 1,000 comments. There is no monthly rental fee. Platform usage is minimal because the Actor runs on 128 MB with plain HTTP requests. Set Maximum cost per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly as soon as the limit is reached - you are never charged beyond it.

Scheduling and integrations

Create an Apify Schedule (for example daily at 08:00) and pass a since-date to get only new items each time. Connect the dataset to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make, n8n or a webhook to receive results automatically, or call the Actor from Python or JavaScript using the Apify API client.

Limitations

Content visible depends on what the chosen instance has federated. Some instances block anonymous API access or rate-limit aggressively; pick another instance if you see 4xx errors.

FAQ

Do I need an account or API key on the source site? No. Only public, unauthenticated endpoints are used.

Do I need proxies? No. The Actor makes a small number of well-spaced requests to official APIs, so datacenter IPs work fine.

Why did my run return fewer items than maxItems? The source simply had no more items matching your filters and date range, or your maximum cost per run was reached.

Is this legal? The Actor only reads publicly available data through documented public endpoints. You are responsible for using the data in line with the source's terms and applicable laws such as GDPR, especially for personal data.

Something broke? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab with your run ID and we will fix it quickly.