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).