It appears API rate limiting has effectively killed these alternatives. You essentially get nothing but “Too many requests” 429 errors.
Lemmy sadly does not have the active niche news and discussions I want. But now nothing can be read without going to Reddit. I hate Spez
Is there a reddit archive alternative? I don’t need up to date comments. Most the times that I am forced to use reddit it is for solutions to technical problems posted years ago. You could have one visit and get a snapshot 2 days after it was posted. Almost nobody adds comments after a day or two.
Or is there an offline database for Reddit that you can download like with wikipedia? If you go by text only or could choose communities that probably wouldn’t be too much data.
I feel like this needs to be done soon if it doesn’t already exist because Reddit is probably going to copy Musk again.
I made this Firefox extension to always open reddit links in the wayback machine.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/reddit-to-wayback-machine/
There was the Pushshift project, which archived all of Reddit’s posts and comments in text (JSON) form. You can download the data here: posts, comments.
If you’re on Linux, once you have downloaded and extracted the respective file, you could run something like
grep -m 1 '"id":"11eoagd"' RS_2023-03 | jq, where11eoagdis the post ID. It’s not pretty, but it works.