I’m not trying to convince anyone to go back i promise, quite the contrary actually cause I think spez plans to just decrease the cost of the API and act like it was a bargain deal sacrifice while not solving any of the issues at all
But, when I think about it even if spez did actually listen and reverse all changes I don’t think i want to go back to Reddit cause from what Ive seen Lemmy is just friendlier and less :Be Corporate Friendly: I would honestly love it if Lemmy did a project like r/place one of these days so we could see what the internet is actually like instead of what happened in 2022 (I really did enjoy what a bunch of communities did but when the mods started abusing their powers to make it corporate r/place lost so much meaning) but i am curious since i’m not going back is there anything Reddit can do to make you go back to Reddit?
I’m still using it because old-dot-reddit-dot-com still works, and until it doesn’t, I probably will. That said, I’d rather the fediverse thrive than the increasingly corporate-beholden reddit does, so I’ll favour what sparse engagement I make to a lemmy instance first.
I think what’s hardest to replace from reddit is the absolutely monstrous archive of posts and discussions, which seems to be a bit of a two-edged sword for them (if the official statements are to be believed) - it costs a tonne in hosting, but makes them the most relevant source for real human discourse. This needs to be handled better, and ideally I’d want to see:
I know I’m an idiot, and some of these are possibly already done and I just haven’t looked hard enough, probably some are impossible for obvious reasons I haven’t seen. Though even if reddit as a company turned around and tried to become a curator of the discussions it holds rather than milk it’s current audience dry with ads, I’d still rather see lemmy out-compete it. Protocol > Platform.
Re: an archive - if you have the hard drive space, there’s a ~2 TB torrent of PushShift’s Reddit backup from 2005 to 12/22, with Jan, Feb, and March 2023 up on Internet Archive.
I haven’t looked too deeply for tooling to interface with the data yet (compressed json) but I expect it’s mostly focused on machine learning or large data analysis, rather than browsing and searching. Still, with so many 10+ year users doing the “overwrite and delete your comments” combo (which will be me come June 29/30), it comforts my data-hoarding soul to even have the potential to dig into the archive for anything I might want to reference in the future.
Regarding the current reddit data: users from /r/datahoarders are currently creating a backup of reddit, and they are still in need of more helping hands!