Apologies if crossposting is against the rules; I’m not entirely sure where the lines are drawn here yet.

I posted this in lemmy.fosscad (fosscad@lemmy?), but realize that may not be the most active venue.

I grabbed archives of fosscad and took a look at the contents of the zst’s. I think I could probably rebuild the contents of the subreddit in some manner or another; the question is scale and hosting. How would we make the posts easily searchable, where would they live, what endpoint can we upload hundreds of thousands of comments into in a reasonable time frame… all that fun stuff.

The archives don’t contain pictures, but contain links to the pictures and the ones I’ve checked are currently still live (meaning the pics are still hosted on reddit). Dunno how long that will remain the case.

I have no idea what the size of the archives would be with pics downloaded; gigs, a TB, no clue. I’m posting this to gauge public interest and I haven’t done much preliminary work (oh, these are json. Yep, dictionaries work. Wingo.)

Is there any interest in making this more publicly available? I’ve run into an issue with a particular build and I’ll be diving through the archives to fix it for my self. It seems like a shame that all this information would be inaccessible to everyone who isn’t able or interested in trawling through their own local archives.

I’m not a programmer by trade, but work in an adjacent space. I can plink along on this if other people are interested (and if anyone is interested enough to help pitch in, even better).

  • hoglegOPEnglish
    3·
    28 days ago

    Beautiful! Not only do we have the knowledge saved, but with any luck, we’ll catch some of those people who would otherwise wander off into the void.

    • The ShittinatorMAEnglish
      1·
      28 days ago

      I’ve already had several people reach out and thank the Lord above that we got this up and running.

      We’re very lucky you came along and had access to all these backups, you know that? Much less that they were so extensive and that Reddit hadn’t purged much if any of the media on them.

      • hoglegOPEnglish
        2·
        28 days ago

        You’re too kind! I didn’t think I would ever actually need any of them, to be honest. Was preparing for a “grid is down” scenario, not a memory-hole situation.

        It’s unfortunate that we’re entering a period where knowledge is actively suppressed.

        So much the better than you’ve got this forum for us. I don’t know when they new subreddits are going to catch the banhammer, but I sure would like to see people migrate off a corporate platform. No freedom in a company town.