I used to run a bot that searched for and posted about abandoned subreddits (subreddits without mods, or where the only mod was the admin-run “request_bot”). My database of abandoned (and banned) subreddits is about 1 million subreddits. I stopped posting the data to Reddit as part of the API protests. I was releasing about 100 randomly selected subreddits from the database a day.
I don’t think I’m going to start releasing the data back on Reddit again, at least not for the forseeable future. Should I release it on Lemmy instead?
My database is uncensored, there’s no feasable way to check 1M subreddits by hand, so it includes a lot of subreddit that are porn related.
To add some more context, I wouldn’t post the data here, I would create a new community for it. The data’s not static, so releasing any point-in-time copy would be out-of-date pretty quick. The bot is still collecting information, just not posting it, so the database is still up-to-date.
I’ve been fairly protective of the information so far, since it would be worth its weight in gold to a spammer or general malfeasor, which is why I historically have only released the data 100 subreddits at a time, so I’m not going to release it in full anywhere, I don’t think that would be ethical. Information like this is virtually impossible to find - it’s possible I’m the only person (outside of Reddit) with this data.
Over the time I’ve run this bot, I’ve had many people message me to say thanks since they have picked up a passion project to rejuvinate an abandoned subreddit, or a subreddit they were subscribed to and didn’t realise it had no moderators (e.g. sole mod had deleted their account for example). I’m also being asked by DM if I’m going to start posting the data again, and I don’t think I want to, at least not on Reddit anyway.
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