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Any interest in building out archives of fosscad as a browsable resource? (forum.guncadindex.com)
submitted 1 month ago by hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com to c/general@forum.guncadindex.com
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Apologies if crossposting is against the rules; I'm not entirely sure where the lines are drawn here yet.

I posted this in lemmy.fosscad (fosscad@lemmy?), but realize that may not be the most active venue.

I grabbed archives of fosscad and took a look at the contents of the zst's. I think I could probably rebuild the contents of the subreddit in some manner or another; the question is scale and hosting. How would we make the posts easily searchable, where would they live, what endpoint can we upload hundreds of thousands of comments into in a reasonable time frame... all that fun stuff.

The archives don't contain pictures, but contain links to the pictures and the ones I've checked are currently still live (meaning the pics are still hosted on reddit). Dunno how long that will remain the case.

I have no idea what the size of the archives would be with pics downloaded; gigs, a TB, no clue. I'm posting this to gauge public interest and I haven't done much preliminary work (oh, these are json. Yep, dictionaries work. Wingo.)

Is there any interest in making this more publicly available? I've run into an issue with a particular build and I'll be diving through the archives to fix it for my self. It seems like a shame that all this information would be inaccessible to everyone who isn't able or interested in trawling through their own local archives.

I'm not a programmer by trade, but work in an adjacent space. I can plink along on this if other people are interested (and if anyone is interested enough to help pitch in, even better).

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[-] gsgmfg@fosscad.io 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

EDIT:

We have all 25k posts from the archive uploaded.

We're now streaming up comments. Already have 80k/380k.

Join the ark! !ark@fosscad.io

!ark@fosscad.io - now has over 14,000 posts.

From 2015 - 2022.

Many have pictures that we've saved.

I have 380,000 comments I'm writing a script to post as well.

[-] woodsman240@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago

Just subscribed this is awesome! Is it going to be past 2022?

[-] gsgmfg@fosscad.io 2 points 1 month ago

I'm uploading from 2022 to June 2025 right now. 43k posts :)

Will do the comments next.

I was able to save 73.7% of the photos. Some breakage is bound to happen sadly - deleted posts, etc.

[-] woodsman240@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago

Thats great news!! Im surprised at how quick this is done im impressed

[-] TheShittinator@forum.guncadindex.com 2 points 1 month ago

With @gsgmfg@fosscad.io finishing things up, I put out a blast to try and get people in here:

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 3 points 1 month ago

Beautiful! Not only do we have the knowledge saved, but with any luck, we'll catch some of those people who would otherwise wander off into the void.

[-] TheShittinator@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago

I've already had several people reach out and thank the Lord above that we got this up and running.

We're very lucky you came along and had access to all these backups, you know that? Much less that they were so extensive and that Reddit hadn't purged much if any of the media on them.

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 2 points 1 month ago

You're too kind! I didn't think I would ever actually need any of them, to be honest. Was preparing for a "grid is down" scenario, not a memory-hole situation.

It's unfortunate that we're entering a period where knowledge is actively suppressed.

So much the better than you've got this forum for us. I don't know when they new subreddits are going to catch the banhammer, but I sure would like to see people migrate off a corporate platform. No freedom in a company town.

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Had to rearrange some things, but I'm pulling data from end of 2022 through 2024. It's a chonker. This is everything, so will need to parse through and find anything id'd as fosscad. Not sure how long it would take to iterate through all of that; it's over 1TB.

I'll be back this evening to update progress; download speed is pretty decent so if no big changes, should have the raw files tonight.

Edit Happy surprise; it's everything from 2023 to 06/2025. So losing the last handful of months of data (unless more gets added later). Still a pretty huge win.

Thanks to Grey Summit Gear for kicking the shit out of this, and the folks who pulled all these dumps!

[-] gsgmfg@fosscad.io 1 points 1 month ago

Flipping fantastic. Can't stop the signal!

I need to make my alt-github to I can PR the scripts and code I wrote to upload all this.

When you get the new zsts posted lmk and I'll start another upload session.

Amazing work.

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 2 points 1 month ago

Just a heads up; I was able to finish pulling down the archives, but it's going to take awhile to parse; wasn't expecting to need this much storage touching my compute lol. I'm hoping I can have those ready for upload tonight or early tomorrow AM.

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 2 points 1 month ago

Amen to that!

Looks like the download speed dipped a bit while I was out; around halfway through now. So another 12 hours or so before the torrents are done, sooner if it picks back up, then I'll need to parse.

I'll ding you as soon as I've got the new zst's up.

And thank you! Would have taken me a week to put that scripting together.

Go team venture.

[-] TheShittinator@forum.guncadindex.com 4 points 1 month ago

You guys are fucking awesome, you know that?

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 3 points 1 month ago

Hey, if you hadn't built this platform for us, it wouldn't be happening. Seeing a bit of the old internet come together really warms my cold, dead heart.

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago

Submissions are in git, but comments still have awhile to cook. Wanted to stay up for them tonight but I don't think they'll be done til morning. I'll check in when they're uploaded.

[-] woodsman240@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago

Not sure how much i could actually help with development, but it is certainly something that is needed. There was a lot of info that will be lost to time otherwise

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 0 points 1 month ago

Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm not tied in to any social media, but if you're fluent in discord, matrix, element, any of the other popular IRC-likes, getting a room/discord set up would be super helpful. Or maybe if there is an existing discord for the community, point me in the direction and I'll try to join.

If you're not on social media, either, no worries (believe me, I understand). The encouragement helps, too.

[-] woodsman240@forum.guncadindex.com 0 points 1 month ago

The fosscad discord is pretty active. Scout has a link to it in one of his reddit comments. Im sure there are some great minds there to help

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 0 points 1 month ago

I'll see if I can track it down. Thanks!

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Reposting here in case it gets lost in the sauce:

There should be more; they may be split into several differential files. I'm going to work on getting the others right now, but I've got limited time before I have to leave for work. If I can't get them up in time, I've been using resources like https://academictorrents.com/details/ba051999301b109eab37d16f027b3f49ade2de13/tech&filelist=1 (if url's can't be posted, it's academictorrents dot com, posts by Watchful1) I could have sworn I grabbed newer data for the fosscad subreddit specifically from a different site, but may have to go through the monthly diffs in this link and pull out anything under the /fosscad id.

These are much bigger, since they're the entirety of reddit (or top 20,000 subs, something like that), so download and parse is going to take a lot longer. Several hundred gigs to pull and parse. On review, no way I can do it all this morning but I can at least get some downloads cooking. Going to start pulling comments/subs for 2023, but won't be able to check on any of this until roughly 6pm eastern.

[-] gsgmfg@fosscad.io 0 points 1 month ago

I'd be interested in figuring out a way to either re-upload them onto Lemmy or similar.

We should definitely download the pics while we still can.

I have a bridge I wrote that pulls r/gundeals to !bazaar@fosscad.io - could do something similar with a bot to post to to a community.

[-] hogleg@forum.guncadindex.com 1 points 1 month ago

Oh, that's awesome. If you've got a bot that can already parse and push to fosscad.io, we should definitely be able to tweak that. I'm not active on discord (any social media really), but I imagine that's the place to organize an effort like this. If there is an alternative that others prefer (I've heard about matrix and element), I'm open to suggestion.

I've been fighting the flu the last couple of days, but on the upswing now. Dunno how much I'll be able to dig in today, but I'll get a github set up; I can dump the zst's there and some psuedocode and notes. If I can see what your bot is ingesting, I can try to match output from the zst's to it.

I think there will be a bit of work marrying comments to submissions; they're split up into two separate archives. Since the pictures are time sensitive (potentially), maybe the move is trying to focus on looping through the submissions and grabbing the pics from their urls, then rebuilding after the fact.

I've got plenty of local storage for pics or if we can dump straight to lemmy, that would be great. I'm completely ignorant to this platform as far as rate-limiting, storage, any of that fun stuff. I don't know how big a whole subreddit will end up being, but I imagine it's not inconsequential.

this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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