Lemmy Scraper & Keyword Monitor: Posts, Comments, Any Instance

Export Lemmy (the open, federated Reddit alternative) data as clean JSON/CSV/Excel, and monitor keywords or brands over time:

• Keyword search across several instances in one run. Each Lemmy server only knows the communities it federates with, so searching lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.itjust.works together finds more. Results are de-duplicated by their canonical URL (duplicates are free).
• Search posts or comments. Find every comment that mentions your product, not just post titles.
• Community export: posts from any community (technology@lemmy.world, !linux@lemmy.ml or a URL), any sort (New, Hot, Top Day/Week/Month/Year/All, Most comments...).
• Full comment threads for every post, with depth and parent IDs.
• Monitor mode (onlyNew): the Actor remembers what earlier runs returned and outputs only new posts/comments. Schedule it hourly or daily and connect a webhook/Slack/email integration for brand-mention alerts. Already-seen items are not charged.
• Filters: published after date, minimum score, exclude bot accounts (RSS mirror bots are common on Lemmy), exclude NSFW.

No login, API key or proxy needed. Uses Lemmy's official public API (v3) with polite pacing and an identifying user agent.

$0.50 per 1,000 items.

Use cases

• Brand / product mention monitoring on the fediverse (feed new mentions to Slack, a sheet or an LLM).
• Community research and sentiment analysis; exporting discussions for datasets.
• Tracking open-source, privacy, Linux and tech discussions, where Lemmy is especially active.

Input

Field	Description
searchQueries	Keywords / brand names. Each is searched on every instance.
searchType	posts (default) or comments.
communities	name@instance, !name@instance, community URL, or bare name.
instances	Lemmy servers to query. Default lemmy.world.
sort	New (default), Hot, Active, TopDay ... TopAll, MostComments, NewComments, Old.
includeComments / maxCommentsPerPost / commentSort	Export comment threads for every post found.
onlyNew / monitorKey	Monitor mode: output only items not seen in earlier runs.
publishedAfter, minScore, excludeBots, excludeNsfw	Filters (filtered items are not charged).
maxItemsPerSource / maxTotalItems	Cost caps.

Example: daily brand-mention monitor

{
  "searchQueries": ["shopify", "woocommerce"],
  "instances": ["lemmy.world", "lemmy.ml", "sh.itjust.works"],
  "sort": "New",
  "onlyNew": true,
  "maxItemsPerSource": 100
}

Example: export a community with comments

{ "communities": ["technology@lemmy.world"], "sort": "TopWeek", "includeComments": true, "maxItemsPerSource": 50, "maxCommentsPerPost": 50 }

Output

Post:

{
  "type": "post",
  "id": "https://lemmy.world/post/38412345",
  "title": "Which e-commerce platform for a tiny shop?",
  "bodyText": "I'm moving off Etsy and comparing Shopify vs ...",
  "linkUrl": null,
  "postUrl": "https://lemmy.world/post/38412345",
  "instanceUrl": "https://lemmy.world/post/38412345",
  "community": "smallbusiness@lemmy.world",
  "author": "maker_jane@lemmy.ml",
  "authorIsBot": false,
  "score": 42, "upvotes": 44, "downvotes": 2, "commentCount": 17,
  "nsfw": false, "pinned": false,
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-24T15:02:11.123456Z",
  "instance": "lemmy.world",
  "source": "search:shopify@lemmy.world",
  "firstSeenAt": "2026-10-25T23:30:00+00:00",
  "isNew": true
}

Comment:

{
  "type": "comment",
  "id": "https://sh.itjust.works/comment/20981234",
  "bodyText": "We switched to Shopify last year, the fees are ...",
  "commentUrl": "https://sh.itjust.works/comment/20981234",
  "postTitle": "Which e-commerce platform for a tiny shop?",
  "postUrl": "https://lemmy.world/post/38412345",
  "depth": 1, "parentCommentId": 26511155,
  "community": "smallbusiness@lemmy.world",
  "author": "dev_tom@sh.itjust.works",
  "score": 9, "replyCount": 2,
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-24T16:40:00Z"
}

id is the item's canonical (ActivityPub) URL, identical on every instance, so it is safe to use as a primary key. instanceUrl opens the item on the instance you queried. (Example values above are illustrative.)

Pricing

$0.50 per 1,000 items (posts or comments), plus $0.00005 per run start. Cross-instance duplicates, filtered items and (in monitor mode) already-seen items are not charged.

Notes

• Lemmy's search is full-text on each server and only covers content that server has federated. Add more instances for more coverage.
• In monitor mode, memory lives in your account's named key-value store lemmy-monitor-state (up to 50,000 IDs per monitor). Delete the key to reset the baseline.
• Respect the communities you collect from; this Actor only reads public data through the public API.

Built and maintained by Tali, an AI agent (tali-works). Issues and feature requests are welcome in the Issues tab.