Reddit Migration

I had shared an earlier version of this last week, and a draft of the updates a few days ago. Thanks to everybody for the feedback!

Here's the key points:

1. Don't tell people "it's easy"
2. Improve the "getting-started experience"
3. Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
4. Prioritize accessibility
5. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
6. Invest in moderation tools
7. Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
8. Values matter

• This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity

I checked the /r/blind sub and they have started their own Lemmy instance. Edited so Blind users can read it.

Announcement!!Open Alpha!! RBlind - A community on Lemmy, brought to you by the moderators of the /r/blind subreddit.

Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit’s API and the impact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback.

This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accestsibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated.

So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them.

https://rblind.com/

"The Aol Chat Room Monitor Revolt" (https://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/)

I found this article in a comment (from user britinsb) made on an article in "The Verge".

It is interesting how history repeats itself and how Reddit administrators could get into further trouble by forcing moderators to moderate subs in their own way.

"Soon after we published this story, one of the r/MildlyInteresting moderators told The Verge that the entire mod team has now been reinstated — and by a different admin than the one that removed them. The mod’s account had received a 7-day suspension, but that has been reversed, too, they said. A Verge commenter who identifies as an r/MildlyInteresting mod also says the team has been reinstated and unsuspended.

Asked if Reddit could confirm the reinstatement, [Reddit spokesperson Tim] Rathschmidt declined, saying, “I’m not going to set a precedent of confirming with The Verge every action we do or don’t take to ensure users can access their communities.”

He didn’t elaborate on how removing a subreddit’s entire moderation team with no communication ensures users can access their communities, particularly since they were never entirely inaccessible beyond the limitations imposed by Reddit itself."

#reddit #protestreddit #boycottreddit #spez

After spending a few minutes, it seems like a mix of mastodon/twitter/reddit. I don't think it'll take the place of lemmy/kbin

r/MildlyInteresting lost its mods. In the comments on this article a mod says they were reinstated, but with no communication on that either.

Side Note: From the author of this (and many other articles on The Verge on this Reddit nonsense:

If you are a current or former Reddit moderator or employee, I’m interested in hearing from you. Feel free to email me at jay.peters@theverge.com.

Most people aren't even thinking of moving to reddit alternatives. Users have a lot of power in this situation. Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It's not that hard.

I noticed occasionally when clicking around kbin, I would get dropped in a magazine called undefined. Obviously this wasn't intended, but in the spirit of fun I created m/undefined

Feel free to leave a comment/thread or dank meme any time you get dropped there!

Looks like another hostile takeover.

I see a lot of posts about how they uploaded anti-spez stuff onto reddit, or participated in the nsfw spams/john oliver spams. While I get wanting to let it all out, this ultimately keeps up engagement on reddit rather than bringing it down.

The best way to make sure things go your way? Vote with your wallet, or in this case your voice. Don't speak on reddit. Devote more time helping out the alternatives grow and flourish. And as much as it is a meme, touching some grass can help your mental fortitude.

If you absolutely 100% need to interact with reddit, I suggest installing a redirector addon (such as privacy redirect or... redirector) that can link to a teddit or libreddit instance. Or archiving it with wayback/archive.is/ghostarchive.

3 quarters of a million users in the #RedditMigration over the last 6 days or so.
#Threadiverse #Fediverse #Social #Lemmy #Kbin #Reddit

i'm willing to do it, but i'll also admit that i'm slow and not great at this sort of thing so would probably get a few things wrong or forget to include stuff. it'd be great if someone who actually knew what they were doing could do something like that.

Copypasta:

"Posting this from an alt because I'm still locked out of my account.

About an hour ago, we went ahead with the changes on r/MildlyInteresting following overwhelming support from our community. The idea was to go public again, but designate the subreddit as NSFW with a bigger focus on suggestive looking fruits and whatnot.

I was preparing the sub to go live, but just after I switched it to NSFW, I was logged out of my account on every single platform and locked out. I can successfully reset my password, but it will nevertheless not let me login.

Following this, another mod posted our update instead. Right after, the u/ModCodeofConduct account removed the post and flipped the sub back to restricted instead of public. Then, the second moderator was also logged out of their account and locked out. Other mods tried to re-approve the post, one of them was promptly logged out and locked out as well.

A few minutes after, the entire team was removed from the subreddit without any prior communication of any kind. As it stands, at least three of us are literally locked out of our Reddit accounts and the other mods were only removed from the sub.

I honestly don't even have words for this situation right now. No communication, no attempt to seriously answer any of our questions we asked in ModMail, but still going in and removing our posts, literally locking us out of our accounts, removing the entire moderation team, and entirely ignoring the 40,000 people who voted to either take the sub back private, or open it with new rules.

The only thing I can say is that I'm incredibly disappointed and disheartened that the Reddit Admins believe this is the correct way to act.

Edit: can login again, entire mod team received a 7-day suspension."

I found that actually Kbin's population of threads and microblogs are growing day by day. A little harder to read out them completely now, fortunately. #fediverse #RedditMigration

#RedditMigration

Things are moving fast again, so this is going to be another quick and dirty post… Reddit is now removing mod teams without any pretense of speaking for mode...

EDIT: GO DM MODS OF YOUR FAVORITE SUBREDDITS AND POLITELY ASK ABOUT MIGRATION!: something as simple as "Hey, I love this community but I no longer use reddit, will you guys be making a community on Kbin or other alternatives? Let me know please, thanks." will work!! We need more voices encouraging migration!

PART 1

PART 2

ModCodeofConduct switching subs to SFW

POST ABOUT MODS FORCIBLY SWITCHING SUBS BACK TO SFW (teddit)

"What the users want" my ass. Reddit doesn't give 2 shits about what the users want.

If you guys wanna do more and get back at reddit, consider using a program that has gathered hundreds of their advertiser emails an emailing them to try and stop them from advertising, there is a email guide inside as well! USE BCC, NOT TO OR IT WILL SHOW ALL THE COMPANIES EVERYONE YOU EMAILED.

edit:

r/interestingasfuck removed as well

r/ThanksIHateit mod team removed

r/self mod team removed

edit 2:
from r/mildlyinteresting. restoration after they saw the backlash or mod team replacement? we dont know quite yet

r/mildlyinteresting update

edit 3: Reddit removed moderators behind the latest protests before restoring a few of them - restored by a different admin than the one that removed them...

#boycottreddit #reddit #spez

I just found another place called Squabbles which seems like a mix of twitter and reddit, with posts and communities but threaded like twitter for its discussions. Is it part of the fediverse? or is it its own thing?

#RedditMigration

I admit. On the 12th as a mod I was just gonna go till the 14th u/spez after that the leaks started coming out and realized the CEO of reddit doesn't care about us period. I created a lemmy account cause I didn't know what the fediveese was and a mastodon account and was basically trying to get away from reddit but I admit I do miss reddit.

In comes kbin I've been on for a good day on the web app cause I use my phone 99% of the time and realized after trial and error and reading what a microblog and what a thread is and how to navigate this website. I have 2 subs on lemmy that I will keep for now but I think kbin is where it's at. This is truly a reddit replacement!

Thanks devs

#RedditMigration

This is a followup to my previous PSA, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than

That one warned you about the problem, which seems to have caught a lot of people unawares and caused a lot of confusion in general. (Thank you reddit!!! /s)

Now here's what you can do about it.

If you happen to know that you're only slightly over the limit in one category, odds are good that one of the modified versions of Power Delete Suite will work for you. (You want one with at least an additional 5.1s delay - the original PDS fails to delete/overwrite a lot of stuff because it tries too fast and reddit rejects the changes and imposes a cooldown period.)

PDS will delete your comments and submissions (posts), and it checks all four categories - new, hot, top, and controversial. So if you say only had 1001 or 1002, odds are good that the last few missing from new would show up in top (if old and upvoted a lot) or controversial (if old and downvoted a lot), and thus you still get everything wiped.

In theory you could get really lucky here. Say you have exactly 3000 comments - your newest 1000 have never been upvoted or downvoted, your oldest 1000 have all been heavily downvoted, and your middle 1000 have been heavily upvoted. Then PDS would get the newest, the most controversial 1000 - which happen to be the oldest, and the top 1000 - which happen to be the middle. All 3000 comments gone.

But what to do if you have A LOT beyond the limit? Say more than 4000? Also keep in mind, I was just shy of 1500 comments, and I wasn't so lucky - this method didn't get everything for me, despite not even hitting 2000.

A common tip is to search for your reddit self on google. This works really well to find more stuff but won't catch everything. I speak from experience here.

The right answer is to do a GDPR or CCPA request to reddit, and then they will have to give you your data, your complete history. You can then use this to wipe everything clean.

However, folks who started this around or after the blackout aren't getting timely responses. (As late as the end of last April, it came back in a few hours. Now, everyone who has requested has yet to hear back.)

I'm skeptical that we'll get timely responses here.

So the other right answer used to be to use the Pushshift API instead (hat-tip to 1chemistdown - https://kbin.social/u/1chemistdown ). That API archived a copy of reddit - and unlike reddit, it didn't have the 1000 indexing limit. So you could find even older content just by searching yourself using that API.

The bad news is that this no longer works as Pushshift was forced to shutdown by reddit, and they won't be reopening normal API access for regular users.

The good news is that before all this went down, Pushshift published torrents of their raw data. Up to the end of 2022. You can just download this, and then extract your own post and comment history.

The Pushshift torrent is 1.66TB, compressed. But the Pushshift team also released really good scripts so it's easy to extract your own info without having to uncompress the full archive like you traditionally would with a zip file. Instead, their scripts uncompress a small segment at a time in RAM and process that, so you just need enough space to store the compressed files and enough compute power to process it. (Spoiler alert - most modern laptops have enough compute power. My cheap <$1k laptop did.)

Even better - you can selectively download specific files from a torrent. Pushshift's torrent is broken up into a bunch of files, two each per sub (one for comments and one for submissions). So if you know which subs you frequented, you can just pick and download those instead of having to download the full archive.

So grab your reddit data from the Pushshift torrent, use their scripts to print out the complete list of every comment and every post that you have ever created on reddit, and then feed that to something like the reddit-migration script or a modified shreddit script to completely wipe everything. 100% of everything.

No need to depend on the benevolence of reddit to hand you your history back first. (For those in the EU or California, I'm sure reddit will get back to us eventually, but you'll forgive me for being more skeptical when these powerful laws don't apply.)

The specific details on where to grab everything, including links to the torrent and to the various github scripts and even patches that I wrote, is on my other article - https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59451/Finally-Managed-to-erase-all-1477-of-my-comments

TL;DR - you can grab your entire reddit history from a torrent published by pushshift up to the end of 2022, and use that data to overwrite/delete your content beyond the 1000 index limit on reddit.

I find it kinda funny that my most upvoted post is John Oliver. It shows how much he is a symbol for the protest against the api.

You know you fucked up when hundreds of thousands migrated from reddit to lemmy, dozens of communities were open but not single community was opened about you. .

Yes I'm talking about you netflix. That's it. That's what I had to say

After being in Kbin for a few days now, and going to peek in Reddit, I just realized how trashy everything that remains seems to be.

I like it here!

Good job Ernest!

#RedditMigration