this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I definitely hope the... simply massive amount of information stored there is archived in some way. I was troubleshooting some technical issues for a very niche hardware and software application this morning and the only sources I could find were on reddit.
I feel similarly about Discord. There is so much technical knowledge and information that would be lost in the blink of an eye if Discord shut down.
Best case scenario for reddit, I think, would be for its IPO to fail, spez and investors call it quits, and it eventually ends up maintained by a not-for-profit foundation in the way that, say, Wikipedia or Blender is.
Either that or it dies, its database published or scraped, and ends up accessible through archive.org or something similar.
EDIT: or a crowdfunded buy-out by John Oliver π
I favor the latterοΏΌ
I helped a lot of people with niche hardware and software troubleshoot things for years on Reddit, I'm planning to leave my comments up because of that.
The amount of times I would search for something to only find threads of people asking about an issue followed by comments that say "deleted by [X software on github] in protest for [issue that was solved years ago]" and responses praising the deleted comment for helping them is too damn high.
Or hell trawling the internet archive for dead sites trying to find solutions.
I don't want people to have to go through that.
I don't care where my answers come from, I just want to troubleshoot crap in a timely manner.
[email protected] did a great job archiving all of reddit and making it available on archive.org. 13.23 billion archives and counting. So personally I just grab reddit links, change them to old.reddit.com and put them in the wayback machine
Tbh the problem with Discord is that its search and indexing functions just suck ass in the first place. I already treat anything posted in Discord as ephemeral information that stops existing once it leaves my view. In that sense i hope lemmy instances for tech support/ troubleshooting take off. Much easier to archive.
I believed this up until the blackout protests started happening, and Reddit shit the bed in responding to the protests.
I went back and sorted through my top comments in tech support, home improvement, other troubleshooting Q&A type subreddits, across my different accounts, and started editing those answers to be short phrases summarizing what the comments used to be. I'll eventually remove them, too, but maybe the indexers will update their cached copies to be the totally unhelpful versions they are now.
Off topic but I like your icon :>
Also i agree - there's lots of answers i can only get from obscure reddit posts..