Lemmy Feed Widget for Website. Free, ActivityPub - Poper
Lemmy Feed Widget

Lemmy communities on any website.

Embed any !community@instance from the federated Reddit alternative in 90 seconds. Public ActivityPub, no auth, AGPL-aligned. Free, no code.

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14-day free trial
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Trusted by 11,000+ brands

Timetics
Academie Digitale
Goldcast
nbcf
Seedstock
Wow
Linkxar
Gale Toyota
Skills
Rugby Sport
Lamp
Leaktronics
Steel
Theatre in Chicago
Globerto
Meetup
FYM
Zeben
Kraftix
IETraditionala
Meethires
Leadscrape
Happily
Timetics
Academie Digitale
Goldcast
nbcf
Seedstock
Wow
Linkxar
Gale Toyota
Skills
Rugby Sport
Lamp
Leaktronics
Steel
Theatre in Chicago
Globerto
Meetup
FYM
Zeben
Kraftix
IETraditionala
Meethires
Leadscrape
Happily
Free forever, paid plans from $19/mo

Try the live Lemmy widget

Live demo, not a screenshot. Paste a !community@instance address, style it, brand it, embed it. What you see here is what ships to your site.

How to use it

How to add a Lemmy feed to your website

Three steps. Under two minutes. No accounts, no tokens, no developer needed.

  1. 01

    Paste a community address or instance URL

    Drop in any Lemmy community address ([email protected]), an instance URL, or a user profile. Poper resolves the home instance and starts pulling public posts immediately via the Lemmy HTTP API.

  2. 02

    Pick a sort, layout, and brand it

    Choose Hot, Active, New, Top (with time window), or Most Comments. Pick a card, list, masonry, or compact layout. Customize colors, fonts, spacing, and NSFW behavior to match your site.

  3. 03

    Copy the snippet and embed

    Paste the one-line script tag into your site. Works on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Ghost, Framer and 250+ platforms.

Works everywhere

Works with every website platform you already use

Drop-in install on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer, Ghost, and any HTML-friendly stack. No build step, no developer needed.

WordPress
Shopify
Wix
Squarespace
Webflow
Framer
Ghost
HTML

Plus 250+ other platforms via the embed snippet. If your site can render a <script> tag, it can render the Lemmy Feed Widget: Embed Federated Reddit-Alternative Communities on Any Website.

What you get with Poper Lemmy Feed

Six things that matter when you are paying for a Lemmy widget, not 30 features no one uses.

Works with any Lemmy instance

Lemmy has no central server. Each instance (lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, programming.dev, lemm.ee, your self-hosted server) operates independently and federates with peers via ActivityPub. Poper resolves the home instance from any community address, calls the public /api/v3 endpoints directly, and caches posts at our CDN edge. Pull from a single community, multiple communities, or a federated mirror. No tokens, no OAuth, no Reddit-style API rotation drama.

No auth required for public posts

Public Lemmy posts are accessible without authentication via the official instance API. Just paste a community address. Privacy-friendly: no cookies, no tracking, no fingerprinting on the embed. AGPL software all the way down.

Native sort modes

Hot, Active, New, Top (hour, day, week, month, year, all), and Most Comments. Matches Lemmy's own ordering exactly. No custom-baked algorithm guessing.

Cross-post merging

Lemmy lets users post the same link to multiple communities. The widget detects identical URLs and merges them into a single card with all community attributions, like the Lemmy web UI does.

Federated fallback

If the home instance is slow or briefly unreachable, the widget pulls the same community from a peer instance via ActivityPub federation. Resilience is the whole point of the Fediverse, and the embed honors that.

Core Web Vitals safe

Lazy-loaded below the fold, async-injected, scoped CSS that does not bleed into your design system. Under 40KB gzipped. Edge cache hit rate above 97%, so visitors never wait on instance response time. No CLS, no LCP regression.

Use cases

Where Lemmy Feed Widget: Embed Federated Reddit-Alternative Communities on Any Website actually moves the needle

Four buyer types who get the most lift from embedding Lemmy Feed Widget: Embed Federated Reddit-Alternative Communities on Any Website on their site.

Open-source advocates fleeing Reddit

After the June 2023 Reddit API price hike killed Apollo, RIF, and Sync, hundreds of thousands of users migrated to Lemmy. Embed [email protected] or your project's home community on the docs site so contributors see federated discussion the moment they land.

Tech communities and developer tools

programming.dev, lemmy.ml, and lemmy.world host the most active tech communities on the Fediverse. Pull !rust, !linux, !selfhosted, or !programming threads onto your developer-focused site as a live, federation-aware discussion layer.

Privacy-focused communities

Lemmy was built privacy-first: no tracking, no analytics, no advertising, no data sale. GDPR-heavy sites, security-focused brands, and privacy media love the no-cookie defaults. The embed pairs naturally with a cookie-free site and does not trigger consent prompts.

Censorship-resistant journalism communities

Lemmy is impossible for any single company or government to take down. Independent journalism collectives, samizdat communities, and free-press advocacy groups host on Lemmy specifically because of federation resilience. Embed the community feed to surface it on the publication site.

Poper vs other Lemmy and forum embed tools

Lemmy's own UI does not ship a polished embed widget. Reddit-focused tools tie you to centralized infrastructure. Discourse widgets only handle Discourse forums. Here is how the popular options stack up.

 Recommended
Poper
Lemmy native UI embed
Reddit widget
Discourse widget
Free plan available
$25/mo entry
$10/mo entry
Works across any Lemmy instance
Per-instance only
Federation-aware (ActivityPub fallback)
Native sort modes (Hot, Active, New, Top, Most Comments)
All 5
All 5
Reddit only
Limited
Top time window (hour to all-time)
Day to year
Cross-post merging
No-auth public post embedding
API key required
DiscussionForumPosting JSON-LD
Custom CSS / total design control
Paid only
Paid only
Sync frequency (lowest paid plan)
30 minutes
On load
1 hour
1 hour
Privacy-friendly (no cookies)
Pricing for unlimited feeds
$19/mo (Starter)
Free (single instance)
$25/mo
$30/mo
Bundled with popups, forms, quizzes

Comparison reflects publicly listed pricing and features as of 2026. Verify current details on each provider's site.

Real teams. Real outcomes.

Open-source maintainers, instance admins, journalists, and privacy-focused brands who switched from one-off instance embeds to Poper.

Poper has improved our website's user engagement! Since integrating Poper's personalized popups, we've seen a dramatic surge in conversions and user interactions. The platform's intuitive design makes creating and customizing popups a breeze, even for those with minimal tech skills. What truly sets Poper apart are its…
Jayson Ang
Jayson Ang
Singapore Property Swapper · Singapore Property Swapper
Fantastic app and support team, they are very quick to help and provide a solution or improvement to their product. Highly recommended!
Alex
Alex
CEO · AH
Poper has been a total lifesaver for our agency! As a digital marketing agency, we’re always juggling a million things at once. Poper has been a real game-changer in terms of streamlining our workflow and keeping track of all our clients’ campaigns. The ability to track all our clients’ websites from one place is a…
Idris Basir
Idris Basir
-

Pricing

Simple pricing. Free plan covers most websites.

Free forever for one widget. Upgrade only when you need faster sync, multiple instances, or to drop the watermark.

Free

Everything you need to ship the widget today.

$0forever
  • 1 widget instance
  • All layouts & customization
  • Brand-match styling
  • 6-hour sync cadence
  • Poper watermark
Start free
Most popular

Pro

Remove the watermark, faster sync, more widget instances.

$19/mo
  • Unlimited widget instances
  • 30-minute sync cadence
  • No Poper watermark
  • Custom CSS
  • Priority email support
  • Shoppable tagging
Start 14-day trial

Business

Multi-site, multi-account, white-label.

$49/mo
  • Multi-account combined feeds
  • Real-time sync
  • White-label embed
  • API access
  • Dedicated success manager
  • Custom SLA
Start 14-day trial

All plans include unlimited page views, no contracts, cancel anytime. Annual billing saves 20%.

Guide · 6 min read

The complete guide to embedding Lemmy on your website

Lemmy is the open-source Reddit alternative that grew from a niche FOSS project into a movement during the June 2023 Reddit API exodus. Built by Dessalines and Nutomic starting in 2019, written in Rust on the back end and TypeScript on the front, licensed AGPL, and federating through ActivityPub, Lemmy is what Reddit looks like when no single company owns it. For brands, indie makers, journalists, and open-source projects, embedding a Lemmy community on your site is a statement: your discussion layer lives on an open protocol, your readers can participate without a corporate account, and your data is not training the next centralized platform. This guide walks through what actually matters when you choose and configure a Lemmy widget in 2026: the instance model, ActivityPub federation, the 2023 migration surge, the Beehaw vs lemmy.world governance moment, and the AGPL values that make Lemmy different.

01

How Lemmy instances actually work

Every Lemmy user, community, and post lives on a specific instance: a server running the open-source Lemmy software (Rust back end, TypeScript front end, AGPL license, source on GitHub). Examples include lemmy.world (the largest general-purpose instance, hosting most of the post-Reddit migration), lemmy.ml (the original instance run by the Lemmy developers), beehaw.org (a moderation-first community that defederated from lemmy.world during the 2023 governance moment), sh.itjust.works (general purpose, Canadian-hosted), programming.dev (developer-focused), lemm.ee (general purpose, Estonian-hosted), midwest.social, feddit.de, and hundreds of smaller and self-hosted instances. A community address like [email protected] tells the world the community name and which instance hosts it. Each instance has its own moderation policies, its own API endpoint at instance.tld/api/v3/, and its own community norms. There is no central Lemmy API to call. A widget that wants to embed a Lemmy feed must resolve the home instance from the address and talk to that server directly. Poper does this automatically: paste any community address and the widget hits the right instance API, caches the response at our CDN edge, and renders posts with the same fidelity as the Lemmy web client. If the home instance is slow or briefly down, the widget falls back to a peer instance that has federated the same community, which is one of the structural advantages of ActivityPub.

02

ActivityPub federation and why a peer fallback works

ActivityPub is the W3C-standard protocol that lets independent Lemmy instances talk to each other. When you subscribe to [email protected] from an account on lemmy.world, your home instance fetches that community's posts via ActivityPub and replicates them locally. From that point forward, lemmy.world has its own copy of the community feed, scores, and comments, kept in sync via federation. If lemmy.ml goes down for an hour during a server upgrade, lemmy.world still has a complete read replica. This is the same pattern Mastodon uses, the same pattern Pixelfed and PeerTube use, and the same pattern Threads adopted in 2024 when Meta added ActivityPub support. For embeds, federation matters most for resilience. The Poper widget queries a primary instance for the community feed; if the primary times out or returns an error, it queries a peer instance that has federated the same community and serves those posts instead. The reader sees the community feed regardless. This kind of cross-instance failover is impossible on centralized platforms (when Reddit goes down, every Reddit widget on every site goes down with it) and is one of the practical reasons brands and journalism collectives picked Lemmy specifically. ActivityPub support also extends beyond Lemmy: Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mbin (a Lemmy-compatible aggregator), and Threads all speak the same protocol.

03

The June 2023 Reddit API exodus and why Lemmy surged

On June 1, 2023 Reddit announced that effective July 1, 2023 the Reddit Data API would move to a paid tier, charging $0.24 per 1000 calls above 10,000 calls per month per OAuth client. Apollo, the most popular third-party iOS Reddit app, calculated its bill at roughly $20 million per year and shut down on June 30. Reddit Is Fun, Sync, BaconReader, and Narwhal followed within weeks. The protest blackout in mid-June saw more than 8000 subreddits go dark. For users who already mistrusted corporate social, the API change was the trigger: roughly 700,000 net new users registered on Lemmy instances in June and July 2023, growing the network from a niche FOSS project of 50,000 users to a recognizable Reddit alternative within weeks. lemmy.world went from 1,000 users to over 150,000 in a month. beehaw.org, programming.dev, sh.itjust.works, and lemm.ee all saw similar growth. The lemmy.ml maintainers (Dessalines and Nutomic) went from a quiet weekend project to running infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of users overnight. The surge revealed both Lemmy's strength (federation distributed the load across hundreds of independent instances) and Lemmy's growing pains (the largest instances had to scale Postgres, the federation queue saturated briefly, and several instances added donation drives to cover hosting). For brands, the takeaway is that the Lemmy community now contains the most engaged, most ideologically committed, most technically literate Reddit refugees, which is a high-value audience for developer tools, privacy products, and open-source projects to reach via embeds.

04

Beehaw, lemmy.world, and Fediverse governance in practice

Decentralization sounds clean in theory and is messy in practice. The clearest example on Lemmy is the June 2023 Beehaw moment. Beehaw.org was founded as a moderation-first community focused on kindness, with stricter content rules than larger general-purpose instances. After the post-Reddit migration surge brought a flood of new users to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, beehaw moderators saw an increase in low-effort posts, brigading, and harassment originating from those instances and could not keep up with manual moderation. On June 9, 2023, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, meaning content from those instances stopped flowing into beehaw and beehaw users could no longer participate in lemmy.world communities. The decision was controversial: some praised it as the federation working as intended (each instance can set its own policies), others criticized it as fragmenting the network, and lemmy.world admins published their own response committing to better moderation. The episode is required reading for anyone embedding Lemmy. It illustrates that Fediverse content is not uniform: a community on one instance may not be visible from another, defederation can change instance reachability with no notice, and a widget that hardcodes a single home instance can break when governance shifts. The Poper widget handles this by resolving community addresses dynamically, supporting peer fallback across multiple federated mirrors, and surfacing instance attribution clearly in each post card so readers know which instance served the content.

05

AGPL, privacy, and why the Lemmy embed looks different

Lemmy is licensed AGPL-3.0, the same copyleft license as Mastodon. The AGPL has a network-use clause: anyone who runs a modified Lemmy instance and serves it over a network must publish the source code for those modifications. Practically, this means every Lemmy instance you embed from is required to make its source available, every fork (LemmyBB, Mbin, etc.) must release its changes, and Lemmy can never be fully captured by a corporate owner the way Reddit was during its IPO arc. The license is not just a legal detail; it is a values statement that shapes what the platform does. Lemmy instances do not run analytics scripts, do not load tracking pixels, do not fingerprint visitors, and do not phone home. There is no advertising on Lemmy. There is no algorithmic feed designed to maximize engagement. There is no data sale to AI training partners. A widget that breaks this pattern by injecting cookies, tracking pixels, or fingerprinting libraries violates the platform's culture and gives privacy-aware visitors a reason to bounce. Poper ships a Lemmy embed that respects these values: no cookies set by the widget, no tracking calls to third parties, no fingerprinting, and a privacy policy that explicitly does not collect personal data from widget interactions. For GDPR-heavy sites (European media, academic institutions, healthcare, public-sector), this is a practical advantage: the embed does not trigger the cookie banner, does not require additional consent management, and does not appear in any data processing agreement audit. Combine that with respect for native sort modes, cross-post merging, and instance attribution, and the embed feels native to Lemmy, not bolted on from a corporate social tool.

Quick reference

What is Lemmy Feed Widget: Embed Federated Reddit-Alternative Communities on Any Website?

A Lemmy feed widget is an embeddable script that pulls public posts from any Lemmy community on the federated Reddit alternative and renders them on your website with native sort modes, cross-post merging, and instance attribution preserved.

Key facts

  • Lemmy was created in 2019 by Dessalines and Nutomic and is licensed AGPL-3.0, ensuring the source remains open even when run as a network service.
  • The platform is decentralized: each instance has its own /api/v3 endpoint, but instances federate via the W3C ActivityPub protocol.
  • Public Lemmy posts are readable without authentication via the standard /api/v3/post/list and /api/v3/community endpoints.
  • Lemmy grew from roughly 50,000 to over 700,000 users during the June and July 2023 Reddit API exodus that killed Apollo, RIF, and Sync.
  • Major instances include lemmy.world (largest), lemmy.ml (original), beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, programming.dev, and lemm.ee, plus hundreds of self-hosted servers.
  • Lemmy does not run advertising, does not sell data, does not load tracking scripts, and does not impose API key rotation, so widgets do not break on platform-side changes the way Reddit and Twitter widgets do.

Frequently asked questions

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