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.
I hope people learn. Stop using reddit.
How does that fix the issue OP is writing about? The knowledge no longer accessible from a simple web search?
Someone posted the question on reddit and someone answered. This happened on the wrong platform, so now they (or other people) have to do it again on a (hopefully) better platform.
Sure, it sucks that reddit has stolen our archive, but this was always in the cards for them, and we willingly played along. It has been clear for a long time that reddit’s top interest is profit, so you don’t even get to be surprised.
Whoa.
You don’t fix, you learn and in the future you try not to make the same mistakes. And Reddit is not the only example.
If I type any subject into Google, followed by the word Reddit, I still get Reddit threads in response.
What if you click it without being logged in?
Yes, even if not logged into Google (and logged out of Reddit), it will still give Reddit tread responses if I mention a topic and then type Reddit.
Running a android OS on a 6 year old 5g phone, could be the reason. Perhaps a current model phone wouldn’t 🤷♂️
Maybe they haven’t made the switch yet
Yah I think it mostly hasn’t hit yet. Might be isolated cases where it has.
Anyway they usually don’t do major changes like this all at once. They’ll roll it out to a few ppl. See if it worked like they wanted. Then broaden. And repeat.
There is a self-hosted app you can run to pretend to be a Google bot and bypass paywalls and forced login. https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft
I’m replacing missing knowledge with local LLM. Fuck google, fuck reddit fuck the sponsored search results, fuck all
LLM is not knowledge.
Exactly. That knowledge has to come from somewhere and if it can’t scrape the sources, like Reddit, the LLM is not going to have the answer either.
Yes it is. It makes mistakes somtime, but vrrifying information is much, much faster then searching for it with nothing
This is a good reason to delete posts and stop contributing to reddit.
If people want old info they can use old archives that harvested all the content. It’s easy accessibility of content that has led to people putting up with reddit becoming anti user removing third party apps, making UI worse, and login requirements.
If using reddit just lurk and delete content. Don’t contribute.
While I do agree, reddit has been shown to un-delete comments that were mass deleted in the past if the user used a script
That’s why you don’t delete your account. You rewrite then delete and keep your account to monitor it.
Either way, it is new content that people mostly use reddit for that is keeping the site alive.
I got permabanned, when I delete posts/comments it just shows deleted on the username area, keeps the content up
If you can edit them, use some bot to edit every post to random garbage.
banned accounts can’t edit
Even worse is the wealth of knowledge that exists in random discord servers…
At some point, we didn’t even notice, we stopped building a library. :(
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
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.
I’ll miss the Arthurian and Latin subreddits in particular. Not sure if they’ll ever be here, and I am often busy with school so not sure if I can do moderation. Plus I’m not the most knowledgeable in those subjects.
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 cant even getting a log in. I was banned about 18 months ago and no matter how I create a login (using a VPN/10-minute email) they still figured out it was me.
Then I discovered this place and thought fuck it.
My last resort was to buy an account on g2g or similar but I decided i don’t care enough.
Need a new device. If they’re really serious about it they might start requiring you to loging through google/iPhone which require phone numbers to register.
But you should be able just to use a different nontainted phone and sign up just fine. I’ve done it on my pi and an extra phone through vpns and seemed to work. This hasn’t been recently but I got banned maybe 6 months ago and made a few burners.
You could maybe try a virtual machine too, just never log back in on your primary phone.
But I agree with everyone’s sentiment don’t go back.
they already shadow ban accounts not created with google or apple sign in
deleted by creator
The people capable of giving those answers aren’t gone forever, tech is prob the one case where lemmy should suffice already, ask the question, you’ll be the first now.
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.
We did this dance with Experts Exchange.
They managed the prefect balance: They left various work-arounds working, so that search would work, and they dwindled to irrelevance while presumably bleeding money.
As plans go, it is reliable.
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.
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…
You just have to add lemmy (obvious downside of some instances not being named a variation of lemmy means they are less likely to show up still), its not like reddit now, its like when you had to add reddit at the end of your search, nows its just always the first result
This has happened to me on iPhone Safari and Firefox for the past few months. This will seal the deal for me against Reddit.
AI scrapers are the fire that consumed the library of alexandria.
Reddit was dead after it had a hit piece written about it all those years ago. Granted the hit piece was very justified but it was all downhill after that.
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
I tried “bulk-downloader-for-reddit” I don’t know how you’ll drop it to lemmy.
