Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,
And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.
Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it’s very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.
Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.
In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.
We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.
“Ppl will figure a way around” you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.
This is the reason I don’t like discord (alongside its lack of privacy, ownership).
I am aware they announced recently that the info will now be searchable (for servers that allow), but I consider it an information black hole.
So many people decide to use it and all that information is not searchable. It’s also lost if discord ever desires it, or the server admin bans you, or wtv.
Moving to a more open internet has to come from the masses, but the masses like Facebook so here we are.
I don’t think the masses like Facebook. I think they hate it, and hate reddit’s new policies. But they’re also distracted / lazy and ignorant and neither understand the alternatives, nor are willing to invest time to discover and learn to use them. I’m also very sure the average person scores significantly lower on both intellectual curiosity and reading comprehension than the average Lemmy user.
When Trump 2.0 started, there was a massive uptick in people attempting to learn about cyber privacy, public infrastructure and other was to be safer and more in control of their digital lives. But most of them couldn’t sustain it and it petered out after about 8 months. It will probably surge back if fascism does massive, rapid bullshit, but as long as they keep turning up the temperature slowly, the frog will just boil to death while doomscrolling and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
I don’t think the masses like Facebook. I think they hate it, and hate reddit’s new policies.
I think the way Cory Doctorow put it is Facebook is betting people love their friends and family more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg.
What I really don’t like about discord is I have to have an account to use it and I can’t separate my accounts across spaces.
I might be part of some really weird spaces I do not want remotely associate with open source or even professional discussion and support groups. Why those tins are on discord I don’t know, but they are.
Moving to a more open internet has to come from the masses
100%. Your frustration is mine too.
I generally agree with your sentiment. But let’s see some possibly positive sides at the same time:
- Maybe this will encourage or entice people within or outside that wall to come to places like Lemmy.
- And maybe will encourage people on Lemmy and similar platforms to share even more.
- As time passes, a lot of that knowledge and information there becomes obsolete. This is something I’m strongly noticing also on StackExchange for example.
You gotta love when a shitty company kills itself
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Thrash taking itself out
In addition to the more utilitarian aspect of Reddit soon-to-be wallgardened, I’m sad that the cultural, community aspect may be as well. While one could argue that certain communities could theoretically be replicated here, it’s just very difficult without significant mass.
Yah, there is that too.
I’ve looked for some niche communities on lemmy. Actually not even very niche lol. Many of them are MIA, or have a bare group with a single post from 2024. You need some mass to get any engagement.
On the other hand. Mass makes bigger groups go downhill real fast. So a tradeoff I guess.
I personally use RedReader (signed out) and “share to” Linkora to save useful threads.
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.sakethh.linkora/
That works for now. If redreader stops working… 🤷 bye Felicia. I don’t visit Reddit much anyway.
I’ve replaced “sitting at PC, nothing to read” with neal.fun, Atlas Obscura, Smithsonian Smart News and Lemmy 🤣
PS: IIRC, you can download a good chunk of reddit as an archive to search against.
https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift
https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiver
I think the full pushshift reddit archive (to 2024?) was 4TB, but you can just grab smaller useful subsections. So it’s less of a workaround and more a “tube is out of the toothpaste, suck shit Spez”.
Actually, redd-archive (which is up to end of 2025) has an MCP, so you could point your local LLM at it and get it to find the info you need, all off line.
Last I checked, it even let you grab snapshots of particular subreddits of your choice, so you’re not grabbing multiple terabytes. 2026 snapshots aren’t out yet IIRC
Information wants to be free
AI scrapers are the fire that consumed the library of alexandria.
This has happened to me on iPhone Safari and Firefox for the past few months. This will seal the deal for me against Reddit.
Looking forward to freeing up a couple more hours of my week!
But seriously, finding search results of use is going to be even more painful.
Why isn’t lemmy searchable?
It is. And many even popular search engine searches will give results from a lemmy instance.
It is, searchable, isn’t it?
At least the app I’m using does have a search function, and it works…
As for search engines, it’s searchable there too, there’s just no much point in filtering by site because… which site?
Search engines could add a specific “search only on the fediverse” filter, but they’re too busy enshittifying themselves and losing money with unprofitable “AI” “search” to do it…
“Ooopsie, gotta enclose the commons again!”
Social products and resources can’t remain accessible to all of society, where’s the profit in that?
I guess redlib could use a login cookie with a dumb reddit account ? Less privacy focused but still accesible without all the bload and stupid ads.
It would likely have to have a large pool of accounts and randomly pick one per request, to avoid Reddit noticing a too-high volume of requests from one account.
IMO, there might be something to that idea. It would have to be a huge pool, and it would be endless whack a mole as reddit etc get better at detecting automated traffic patterns. The more requests, the bigger the pool has to be.
Reddit is very good at detecting multiple accts using dev fingerprinting, which they could do here too. It might be hard to have a big pool and keep it alive.
In theory, I think it might work. Esp with heavy caching. In practice, IDK. There’d be challenges for sure.
I dont think that would work. Not a programmer in the least bit but I’m sure Resist would recognize when a single login cookie is pulling and unreasonably amount of request from the website.
I was referring to your own dumb reddit account cookie, but yeah this would take away the whole purpose of redlib however it would still grant access to important stuff present on reddit :). It was anyway inevitable…
There’s a fork that does exactly this already. It works but yeah it kind of eliminates the point.
Yah … I think it eliminates the point if it requires a per-user login. And if they try to put it all behind a common login, then brackled@lemmy.world’s point enters the picture. Reddit will cut it off. Or make it so rate limited to be useless for that.
There might always be some way to get a little data out. But it can become so painful, so limited, to be almost useless.
There is a fork that also incorporates small browser to scrape reddit directly. No cookies needed but UX gets a hit(poster names censored until opening the post, not all comments loaded at once, search not working, 403 errors).
I hate to sound like I’m victim blaming, but this kinda sounds like a Leopards Ate My Face kind of situation. How can anybody trust Reddit to do what is good for the people that use the site? Anybody who writes software for Reddit must expect that it will be a cat and mouse situation where the community UX is deprioritized to chase money.
Is there a tool to download all reddit posts? I didn’t want to delete from reddit because some people might find it useful but now that it’s gated, I wanna move it all to lemmy.
Iirc shreddit lets you download all your posts before deleting them
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