Lobsters

What the free route requires

• Free but invitation-gated — you must be invited by an existing user (public invite tree; chat room is the suggested route), and new accounts face a 70-day probation with real submission limits

Requirements

• An invitation from an existing Lobsters user (the tree is public; reaching out in the IRC/chat room is the documented path)
• New users (<70 days) cannot submit links to domains the site hasn't seen before, cannot use the show/announce/job/ask/meta tags, cannot flag or resubmit
• Self-promotion must be less than a quarter of your stories and comments — write-only product promotion is explicitly banned
• Strict topicality: computing/programming content; entrepreneurship and product announcements are off-topic
• Spam flag covers content 'designed to promote a commercial service' — product launches get flagged

Prepare before opening the form

• Get invited (chat room or a contact on the invite tree)
• Plan to participate genuinely for 70+ days before your own domain can be submitted — and even then keep self-promo under 25%
• The realistic launch angle: someone else submits your technical content, or you share genuinely technical writing

Workflow

1. Obtain an invitation (lobste.rs/chat, or ask a member)
2. Participate in discussions; build a normal usage pattern
3. After the new-user period, submit genuinely technical stories — tags must come from the predefined list
4. Never submit your own marketing landing page — it will be flagged as spam

What counts as live

A submitted story appears on lobste.rs with its tag set and discussion thread

Sources

• Lobsters About/Guidelines — invitation-tree signup, 70-day new-user restrictions (cannot submit links to previously-unseen domains, can't use show/announce/job/ask/meta tags), self-promo must stay under ~25% of activity, strict computing topicality, marketing-analytics domains banned and utm params stripped ↗