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Loss of niche and technical information (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey All,

Tl;Dr: Save Reddit technical expertise before it's lost to the sands of time and corporate shutdown.

Just wanted to get a discussion started on what would be, in my opinion, the greatest loss that we, as a society, would experience with the loss of Reddit. Proposed solutions welcome. And please don't take this as me supporting Reddit in any way shape or form.

For years Reddit acted as the Internet's foremost discussion board. As part of that it became host to a slew of subreddits which house niche information and technical expertise. I can't tell you how often I've struggled to find a solution to a particular problem only to stumble across it on a years old reddit thread.

That information is, frankly, invaluable. Reddit may not be tailored to providing technical advice akin to the likes of stack overflow but, nevertheless, it is home to some of the hardest to find answers. If Reddit was to disappear tomorrow, so would that information.

As such I think that information should be treated as a goldmine, and just like a goldmine, excavated. If Lemmy is to play host to the great Reddit migration then it might well play host to these valuable tidbits. Exactly how such an excavation could be done without a blanket copy of all data on Reddit I don't know. But I think it's definitely something worth discussing and promoting amid Reddits recent mishaps. Who knows what the future holds for the site? But it's downfall shouldn't lead to the loss of decades worth of troubleshooting efforts and technical expertise.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think what you are looking for is the Archiveteam's Reddit project.

Archiveteam (AT) is a group which according to their website,

is in no way affiliated with the fine folks at ARCHIVE.ORG

However, the goals and philosophy of archive.org, aka The Wayback Machine, aka The Internet Archive do have significant overlap with AT. AT is coordinated by a staff member of archive.org, and the products of their work are typically donated to archive.org.

They do missions to save particular collections of internets which are under imminent or generalized threat of deletion. One way to participate is by installing their custom Warrior VM software on your computer and it will use your home internet connection to pretend to be a user and systematically crawl/save the material in a coordinated fashion which evades detection. There can be other tasks if you can't or don't want to run that software. For example if the Warriors are triggering captchas, they can forward the captchas to users who sit around solving them. So you can solve captchas on other people's computers so those computers can proceed unattended.

Here is the tracker showing the moment to moment progress. At the moment it display 13.58 billion items weighing in at 3.06 petabytes (3,060,000 GB).

Here is a reddit post from a month ago going over the project.

You can find more comprehensive info on their website. They coordinate via chat.

I would also like to add that while I share the sentiment about technical information, and I have already been stumped with some issues I know I could have solved with reddit, we shouldn't keep a narrow perspective. The nerd stuff is the most resilient because we are the people most comfortable with technology who a) have a lot of other established forums, and b) have the best ability to adapt to a new forum and regroup. I am really deeply sad about all the non-techy groups who I fear will now be dissolved forever. All that knowledge.... is much more gone. I can find another place to resolve issues with linux or ask about mechanical keyboards. Much of the rest of it I have no idea without resorting to instagram or tiktok which I think are revolved around fundamentally different relationships and communications.