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
deleted by creator
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.