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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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It depends on your location and who you are.
A while back, I did an experiment. Reddit started asking me to log in to scroll, so I closed the window and didn't try again that day. Next day, I tried to scroll reddit and the login to view popup appeared again. So I closed the window and didn't look at reddit for a week. After a week, I went on reddit and magically it no longer worried about me logging in...for about a month.
They do A/B testing where they put one feature in front of some folks and a different feature in front of others so they can gather data about what people will and won't tolerate. Between that and the massive tracking they do with IP addresses for people going around account bans, and there's no real way to know if they were targeting you through cookies/IP, or if you just fell into different groups.
I don't think they put a lot of thought into what'll that do for some of the subreddits that are for desperate people looking for advice since two people back to back won't get the same advice. There's no way to swap notes, no reddit-of-record, and now all that good advice (and some of it was good) is locked away. It warms my cold dead heart to see their stock tank because they don't deserve the best of their users.
Essentially yes, my thinking was simply that it's A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H...etc testing.
I had reddit accounts in the past, though I deleted them all and stopped participating about 2-3 years ago. My assumption is that my passive scrolling was connected to previous accounts through IP, device ID, proximity to other devices, other accounts, typing cadence, etc., and I fell in the category of "maybe we can entice them back".
I also agree that reddit likely made the decision to sacrifice a lot of high quality low engagement content for the purposes of mass market engagement farming. It's sad as shit. I've got copies of wikipedia from back in the day, but I never thought to download reddit.
Edit: Uhh, maybe there should be a group doing annual backups of lemmy. It's a nice place now, but so was reddit.
I'm sure there are a bunch of people who are a lot more knowledgeable about it, but it might be as simple firing up your own instances and just federating. By not allowing people to post you'd just be in readonly mode and would get passed all the posts, maybe. With every other kind of archive process like this the images/videos/audio are the long pole. A full 100% backup of "what did everyone see back then" is out of reach; even youtube (or especially youtube) goes back and edits old videos for newer compression or a change in copyright rules.
My only real thought on it right now is an annual back up is waaaaaay too slow. I'd want to see more about what the ActivityPub stream looks like. I'd want to hear from an owner of an instance about how quickly their storage requirements go, and I'm now curious about whether there's any evidence of anyone else such as Three Letter Agencies already backing it all up.
uhh, relevant username?
I would assume that the entirety of lemmy is being scraped by three letter agencies and their global equivalents. Hell, I assume that a small core minority of the tankies are actually state actors pushing statist propaganda, as lemmy does skew pretty left.