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 wanna see if YouTube is that stupid they send my 18+ year old YT account an age verification check. April 2007 feels like a long time ago.....

Dumping YT / gMaps / Google SSO etc and replacing them bit by bit is a hard vice to break, but I've got others using self hosted shit now (yay Immich and Jellyseerr arr....) and I'll keep on doing it for others too.

In the lieu of an IPO u/spez has actively destroyed everything that made Reddit good!
Gate keeping the API thinking it'll help with making some bigshot LLM some day lol

That place is becoming more and more of a shithole. Bots, Ads, trolls, garbage mods… deleted the app last month.

When RIF died, Voyager became the new forum app for me.

We are sliding rapidly into Idiocracy.

Buddy, we are already there. “Ow, my balls!” Would be high-brow tv these days.

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

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.

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.

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

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. Even if you can figure out who asked the right question and when, you have to trawl through a sea of inane garbled chat to get to the developer/expert response.

Specialised topic forums really need to make a resurgence but I doubt they will.

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.

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

Weren't Reddit complaining a couple of years ago that too many AI bots crawls were stressing their servers.

Doesn't the internet archive relieve that stress?

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.

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.

Reddit warned my account ( first warn in 10 years ) and deleted the comment when I told a American he can strike peacefully to show the government they are against it.

I got a warn for recommending violence by an ai , the human that checked it agreed and didn't remove the warn haha.

Reddit is just feared that their censorship goes public.