OC How would people feel about a new Magazine which is dedicated to archiving Reddit posts, comments and general history?
With all the talk about posts being lost due to people deleting comments, posts, and subs going private or generally protesting, I wondered if people have an appetite for doing some work to move key bits of reddit history over to kbin/Lemmy for posterity?
I have to admit I find all this talk of copying and backing up other people's content to be a bit odd.
When reddit restores our content after we delete it, we get angry - it was my content to delete as I wish, how dare they reverse my decision? When our content is monetized for more than server costs+a bit of profit, we get angry - we made that content, we don't mind you covering your costs and earning a living, but why do you get to get filthy rich from it? When our posts are quoted for pseudonews articles mining comments for opinions, we're taken aback -- excuse you, you could have at least asked if you could quote my story about my most embarrassing whathaveyou.
We get angry about these things because we feel a sense of ownership over what we post. And I don't really see the difference here - this is another form of removing content from the control of its creators. If people want to copy their own stuff over, that's fine! But I would never dream of removing that choice from the original poster.
Yes, reddit's collective knowledge was valuable, and yes, there are some large-scale operations to preserve the internet in things like the wayback machine, the datahoarders backup, and other efforts... but these doesn't mean we should also start a grassroots movement to disrespect ownership of content on top of all that's already in place.
I was a member of the Civcraft community for a long time. We had a pretty extensive wiki set up within Reddit, and when they switched over to new Reddit our Wiki got nuked. We lost sooo much history and archival work for Civ/Ancap Minecraft in general. Just wanted to bring this up so hopefully you can try to safeguard against a similar situation.
A dedicated instance sounds better than a magazine though not sure who'd be willing to take on the expense of taking on that volume of data.
The easiest grab method would be using the API, which provides about a week to get dev approval and to copy all Reddit data via the API without getting banned.
Actually even subreddits are affected by the 1000 indexing limit IIUC. So we would have limitations on what content we could discover without an external source.
I guess we could grab from the pushshift torrents and use API access to grab as much as we can of the last couple of months? (Pushshift lost access at the start of May iirc so that's where the gap would start.) Also getting stuff from subs still protesting as private would be a problem.
I'm not sure I see the point. Is the Fediverse good at search and is it indexed? There's already the pushshift database, which seems more useful. People won't come here to reminisce and be sentimental about reddit ghosts. New content, interactions and communities are what is needed.
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