How to share your startup on Lobsters
TL;DR
Lobsters (lobste.rs) is a free, invite-only link aggregator about computing. Entrepreneurship is off-topic, new members cannot post self-promo for their first 70 days, and self-promo must stay under a quarter of your activity. It fits technical founders who write about how they build software, and almost nobody else.
What is Lobsters?
Lobsters is a community link site launched on 3 July 2012 by joshua stein. Members submit links, tag them from a fixed list and vote, and moderators have no power to push a story up or down. Every member's profile shows who invited them, in a public invitation tree.
The about page says the site focuses "pretty narrowly on computing" and names off-topic subjects such as entrepreneurship, management, careers and investing. A post about your funding round falls outside that scope, and a technical write-up about the database design behind your product fits inside it.
Who should post on Lobsters?
- Founders of developer tools, open source projects and infrastructure who publish detailed technical articles.
- Startup engineers who blog about debugging, performance or security, with the product as background.
- Skip it if you sell to non-technical buyers or want launch-day traffic. The flag rules treat content made to advertise a commercial service as spam.
- Skip it too if you know nobody there: there is no open sign-up.
How much does Lobsters cost?
Lobsters is free, with no paid tiers or paid placement, and the about page says it does not accept donations.
The domain authority of 47 belongs to lobste.rs. In our check on 30 October 2026, story links carried rel="ugc noreferrer": Google reads them as user-generated links, and visitors from Lobsters show up as direct traffic in your analytics. Come for readers and comments.
How do you share your startup on Lobsters?
- Read the Lobsters about page, above all the parts on topicality, self-promotion and invitations.
- Get an invitation. The quickest way, says the about page, is to talk to someone you know from the site. If members already posted an article you wrote, say so in the Lobsters chat, the #lobsters channel on Libera.Chat IRC.
- Sit out the first 70 days. New members cannot submit self-promo, links to domains never posted before, or stories tagged show, announce or ask.
- Comment and submit good links from other people. The rule of thumb: "self-promo should be less than a quarter of one's stories and comments in the last year."
- Submit your technical article or project with fitting tags, such as show for projects or release for software releases, and stay to answer questions.
Tips to get more out of Lobsters
- Submit the article and keep the landing page out of it: a post on how you built your sync engine gets read, and a pricing page gets flagged.
- Do the maths: 3 links to your own work in a year need at least 10 other stories and comments next to them.
- Pick tags with care. Members filter and subscribe by tag.
- Disclose your role with a hat, the Lobsters feature for commenting as an employee or a project maintainer.
Our verdict
Lobsters rewards founders who write well about engineering and flags anyone who treats it as a launch channel. If your product is a developer tool and you blog about how it works, ask for an invitation and respect the 25 percent rule. Every other startup gets more from Hacker News or Product Hunt.
More options: see all founder communities. Planning the launch around this listing? The Fe/male Switch startup game walks women founders from idea to first customers.