Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.
I know there are some databases of all Reddit comments prior to… maybe 2015? I forget. Would be cool to port them into an open source clone that isn’t profiting off them, just for the times comments were really useful, like solving a tech issue only a couple people had ever documented.
At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it’s relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I’m not actively aware of any examples.
If someone has been maintaining a fork, I’d love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don’t know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.
A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.
Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.
2023 fork of open source reddit
~2024 fork
I’m sure there are others…