I've thought of doing something similar, and think, while the federated spam is hard to deal with, signup spam is manageable if you somehow restrict signups to the actual community you want to support. Open signup on the web is a nightmare.

For a city, an interesting idea might be to only allow signups on a dedicated, physical wifi AP placed somewhere strategic in your city. People would literally have to go to a physical location to sign up. Piggy-backing on a library system would be another option if you could somehow get them to buy-in.

I think if the fediverse was ever to become more mainstream, it would naturally splinter. For example, the corporate stuff would be big, and those people who value the small-instance experience we have now would probably de-federate from it. There would always be small fediverses, even if the big fediverses got REALLY big.

Hmm. There are many things that could cause legal trouble for the Wayback Machine. I wouldn't jump to conclusions.

You can see on Lemmy that many people would prefer to outlaw scraping, fair use, and all that. Well, not for the "good guys" obviously, but the law doesn't work on vibes. The IA would be legally impossible in most countries. In the EU, it would be a major crime because of copyright and GDPR. It's only the traditional US commitment to free speech and fair use that makes it possible at all.

The IA exists in a legally precarious position. That's not because of any shady backroom dealing. If the crowd in this community had its way, it would be gone.

I know the EU has different (stricter) laws and that they vary between states. (Germany being particularly awful)
There is however some complicated form of fair use policy.
If the IA hosts music and books that might be problematic.
But I'm talking about archived webpages and information previously available to the public with zero commercial value that has been removed.
And this includes American sites.

People who posted on Reddit ( speaking in the past tense, because who would continue to do so now that we have better things? ) never intended for it to be of limited access. Reddit was a publicly accessible place, and people shared their thoughts and comments on it because it was the frontpage of the internet, so the place of choice to share things with the world. That being scraped should not be a problem. But clearly Reddit didn't want to give you a platform to share your thoughts with the world, they wanted you to donate your thoughts and take it as their property so that they can capitalize on it.

Knowing the corrupt pricks that Google are, I wouldn't put that past them. The age-gating isn't even about protecting the kids, it's about censorship.

Lol every platform seems to live long enough to shoot themselves in the foot.

I quit reddit, cold turkey, the day they shut off free API access for 3rd parties. Except for a couple of fairly niche subs I haven't missed it at all.

Thanks for sharing. I will check it out

reddit can go fuck itself.

"Ow, my balls!" was already a thing in the 90s, on BIG time tv. It was called america's funniest videos.

Ah, back when it was “America’s Funniest Home Videos”. Yes, they pioneered the crotch-smashing format. I’m just saying, shit like Real Housewives makes getting hit in the balls look like Masterpiece Theatre.

I don't know... I mean, I agree. But I'm seeing a lot of demands that instances should prevent scraping. Ok, it could be astroturf; a campaign by Reddit/data brokers to neutralize the free competition. But you have seen all those deleted posts on Reddit. Those are some special little minds.

But I’m talking about archived webpages and information previously available to the public with zero commercial value that has been removed.

It is still "intellectual property". Maybe the policy is to just oblige removal requests if the content doesn't seem to be of public interest. Cause why not, right? Look at all the people here on Lemmy angry that their worthless posts are scraped or deleting them on Reddit. Obliging takedown requests is certainly the path of least resistance.

Enshittification

Not to mention so many projects putting their support in walled garden chat services like Discord that you can’t even search via search engine.

Seeing this happen has been one of the saddest most desperate parts about watching the internet dying.

It was obvious what was going to happen years ago, that didn't stop people from acting like I was a reactionary foolish cynic when I voiced concern about this though.

Seriously FUCK Discord (and Reddit).

Same here. I've been better off ever since.

Phpbb/mybb/smf haven’t seemed to do that.

Doesn't the internet archive relieve that stress?

I think that was probably the real reason for the block, the Internet Archive is too functional, scalable and accessible of a service for reddit's lame excuses about needing to gatekeep access to the community created content on their website to not make reddit look totally stupid unless they came up with an excuse to block the Internet Archive.

The two things that just make me boggle, specifically about that, was just how filthy bob saget was (sort of like robin williams) in his comedy outside of the tv roles, and apparently how much straight up home-made porn was sent in to that show.