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what would Reddit need to do to get you to go back
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I'm still using it because old.reddit.com still works, and until it doesn't, I probably will. That said, I'd rather the fediverse thrive than the increasingly corporate-beholden reddit does, so I'll favour what sparse engagement I make to a lemmy instance first.
I think what's hardest to replace from reddit is the absolutely monstrous archive of posts and discussions, which seems to be a bit of a two-edged sword for them (if the official statements are to be believed) - it costs a tonne in hosting, but makes them the most relevant source for real human discourse. This needs to be handled better, and ideally I'd want to see:
I know I'm an idiot, and some of these are possibly already done and I just haven't looked hard enough, probably some are impossible for obvious reasons I haven't seen. Though even if reddit as a company turned around and tried to become a curator of the discussions it holds rather than milk it's current audience dry with ads, I'd still rather see lemmy out-compete it. Protocol > Platform.
Re: an archive - if you have the hard drive space, there's a ~2 TB torrent of PushShift's Reddit backup from 2005 to 12/22, with Jan, Feb, and March 2023 up on Internet Archive.
I haven't looked too deeply for tooling to interface with the data yet (compressed json) but I expect it's mostly focused on machine learning or large data analysis, rather than browsing and searching. Still, with so many 10+ year users doing the "overwrite and delete your comments" combo (which will be me come June 29/30), it comforts my data-hoarding soul to even have the potential to dig into the archive for anything I might want to reference in the future.
Regarding the current reddit data: users from /r/datahoarders are currently creating a backup of reddit, and they are still in need of more helping hands!
These peeps are nuts in the best way
This Reddit interface flown under the radar for most of its existence, but you might have like Reddit compact mode for mobile i.reddit.com. At least until they killed it this year like in March without so much as an announcement.