Self-host Reddit – 2.38B posts, works offline, yours forever
Reddit's API is effectively dead for archival. Third-party apps are gone. Reddit has threatened to cut off access to the Pushshift dataset multiple times. But 3.28TB of Reddit history exists as a torrent right now, and I built a tool to turn it into something you can browse on your own hardware.
The key point: This doesn't touch Reddit's servers. Ever. Download the Pushshift dataset, run my tool locally, get a fully browsable archive. Works on an air-gapped machine. Works on a Raspberry Pi serving your LAN. Works on a USB drive you hand to someone.
What it does: Takes compressed data dumps from Reddit (.zst), Voat (SQL), and Ruqqus (.7z) and generates static HTML. No JavaScript, no external requests, no tracking. Open index.html and browse. Want search? Run the optional Docker stack with PostgreSQL – still entirely on your machine.
API & AI Integration: Full REST API with 30+ endpoints – posts, comments, users, subreddits, full-text search, aggregations. Also ships with an MCP server (29 tools) so you can query your archive directly from AI tools.
Self-hosting options:
- USB drive / local folder (just open the HTML files)
- Home server on your LAN
- Tor hidden service (2 commands, no port forwarding needed)
- VPS with HTTPS
- GitHub Pages for small archives
Why this matters: Once you have the data, you own it. No API keys, no rate limits, no ToS changes can take it away.
Scale: Tens of millions of posts per instance. PostgreSQL backend keeps memory constant regardless of dataset size. For the full 2.38B post dataset, run multiple instances by topic.
How I built it: Python, PostgreSQL, Jinja2 templates, Docker. Used Claude Code throughout as an experiment in AI-assisted development. Learned that the workflow is "trust but verify" – it accelerates the boring parts but you still own the architecture.
Live demo: https://online-archives.github.io/redd-archiver-example/ GitHub: https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiver (Public Domain)
Pushshift torrent: https://academictorrents.com/details/1614740ac8c94505e4ecb9d88be8bed7b6afddd4
https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiverOpen linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com
Just so you're aware, it is very noticeable that you also used AI to help write this post and its use of language can throw a lot of people off.
Not to detract from your project, which looks cool!
Yes I used AI, English is not my first language. Thank you for the kind words!
Would love to see you learn an entire foreign language just so you are able to communicate with the world without being laughed at by people as hostile as yourself.
I can't even learn my own language!
I mean I can't see what the comment was and I'm assuming it must've been downright hateful, but that person almost certainly has learned a foreign language just to communicate with the world and in fact had to learn another foreign language in school because their name is Estonian for "gypsy" and learning two foreign languages (usually English and Russian, sometimes German or something else for the second foreign language) is required. Likely they speak 2.5 languages as is common here (my German is so bad I count it as half a language - native speakers speak too fast for me, but I can kinda get my point across if needed), but could be more.
Just pointing out that even when trying to be accepting of others, subtle anglo-defaultism can show up in your comment, not that I necessarily agree with whatever the comment was.
They said it wasn't their "first" lanugage. Which leads me to believe that they do speak English. If that's the case, then they indeed are kind of lazy. There have already been studies in the impact of AI when used for communication and the results are not positive.
This isn't something I'd personally point out and criticize, just something I wouldn't do personally. Take the time to express your own ideas in your own words. The long term cost is higher than the short term gains.
Hey I drove to the library, picked up all these things you needed, got dinner here ya go, free!
You drove? man that's lazy...
He used AI to clean up translation and save time after he spent a fuck ton of time curating and delivering us a helpful product. Calling him out as lazy is an awful take.
there are the so called activists that complain alot then there are the activists that deliver projects and code... enough said
"Activists"? What are you even talking about?
Regardless, I specifically said that what you did wasn't wrong or anything likw that. I simply think that it's going to do you more harm than good in the long run. You're free to do whatever you want though, obviously.
Another piece of advice. When someone simply shares an opinion, don't get instantly butthurt over nothing. Otherwise this might as well be reddit.
First, that's an awful analogy.
Second, you're assuming (for some unknown reason) that they "cleaned up" the "translation" using ai. You have literally no idea exactly how they wrote the post. It's kinda weird to make up a random scenario but ok.
Third, no, it's not an awful take. You can code something that requires a ton of effort but write awful documentation. One thing does not make the other impossible.
Fourth, I already explained that there have already been studies that concluded that using AI to write stuff for you has a negative impact on your communication skills. This is not an opinion or me being ingrateful or whatever. I was just sharing information.
If that documentation was awful, I'd REALLY like to see your take on NixOS :)
I have A1 and A2 level in a couple of non-first languages, technically I can speak those, realistically I don't and will not be able to communicate something more complex than ‘here, take a look’
So I don't agree with your absolutistic stance
There's nothing "absolutistic" about my "stance". If you're rusty using a language, you won't get better if someone else does the homework for you. Make an effort, make mistakes, write in a way that sounds weird, who cares. But practice. If you only take the easy way out, that'll be your only option in the future.
Although, like I already said, that's MY way of thinking about it. If you want to use ai to write your stuff, you do you. It doesn't negate the fact that, whle it's not "wrong", it's the lazy (or minimum effort) option. Don't know why it bothers you so much.
Brush, you do not seem like a nice person to be around.
Spread love and kindness, not hate.
I hope you have a better rest of your day.
Shut the fuck up loser.
Yu mussi bawn backacow
You're awesome. AI is fun and there's nothing wrong with using it especially how you did. Lemmy was hit hard with AI hate propaganda. China probably trying to stop it's growth and development in other countries or some stupid shit like that. But you're good. Fuck them
Yup, if there was ever a decent use for AI, this is it. Lemmy can (and will) hate the shit out of it, but it took a little burden off the shoulders of someone doing us a great service.
I fucking hate lemmy sometimes.
It would be neat for someone to migrate this data set to a Lemmy instance
It would be inviting a lawsuit for sure. I like the essence of the idea, but it's probably more trouble than it's worth for all but the most fanatic.
Is it though? That is (or was, and should be again) publicly accessible information that was created over the years by random internet users. I refuse the notion that an American company can "own it" just because they ran the servers. Sure they can hold copyright for their frontend and backend code, name and whatever. But posts and comments, no way.
Of course it would be dumb for someone under US jurisdiction but we'll see how much an international DMCA claim is worth considering the current relations anyway.
They don't own it, the individual posters own the content of their own posts, however, from the reddit terms of service:
And with each of those rights granted, Reddit's lawyers can defend those rights. So no, they don't own it "just because they ran the servers" - they own specific rights to copy granted to them by each poster.
(I don't like this arrangement, but ignorance of the terms of service isn't going to help someone who uploaded a full copy of the works they have extensive rights to) On this subject I think there needs to be an extensive overhaul to narrow what terms you can extend to the general public. The problem is I straight up don't trust anyone currently in power to make such a change to have our interests in mind.
I'm not at all familiar with legalese, but wouldn't 'non-exclusive' in that statement mean that you, and others permitted by you, can redistribute the content as you see fit? Meaning that copying and redistributing reddit content doesn't necessarily violate reddit's terms of service but does violate the user's copyright?
Yeah so at worst you could get sued by some random reddit users that don't want their post history hosted on your site.
Given how little traction artists and authors have had with suing AI companies for blatant copyright infringement, I kinda doubt it would go anywhere.
Might be easiest to set up an instance in a country that doesn't give a fuck about western IP law, then others can federate to it.
So yeah, fanatic levels of effort.
Brb, setting up a Lemmy server in Red Star OS
(The machine with the only Steam account active in North Korea
would like toalready knows your location)The chances are pretty high that is probably Kims computer, arent they?
I think we were all hoping that some loveable genius was quietly subverting their surveillance state and getting a view of the outside world via Team Fortress 2, but, yeah, if it's not North Korea's fattest man, it's probably a high ranking military crony.
. . .Hey just musing here but that sounds like a kinda hilariously easy doxx. You don't think they'd keep state secrets on that same machine? . . . Surely. . .? Noooo. . . 🤔
Post and comments are not Reddit's IP anyway :3
They might have set up the user agreement for it. Stackexchange did and their whole business model was about catching businesses where some worker copy/pasted code from a stackexchange answer and getting a settlement out of it.
I agree with you in principle (hell, I'd even take it further and think only trademarks should be protected, other than maybe a short period for copyright and patent protection, like a few years), but the legal system might disagree.
Edit: I'd also make trademarks non-transferrable and apply to individuals rather than corporations, so they can go back to representing quality rather than business decisions. Especially when some new entity that never had any relation to the original trademark user just throws some money at them or their estate to buy the trust associated with the trademark.
/u/Buddahriffic put it better than I could.
I agree, it shouldn't be reddit's intellectual property. But the law binds the poor and protects the rich.
this is one reason i support tor deployment out of the box 😋
Now this is a good idea.
Lemmit already existed and was annoying as hell. It was the first account I remember blocking.
This seems especially handy for anyone who wants a snapshot of Reddit from pre-enshittification and AI era, where content was more authentic and less driven by bots and commercial manipulation of opinion. Just choose the cutoff date you want and stick with that dataset.
And only a 3.28 TB database? Oh, because it's compressed. Includes comments too, though.
Yes! Too many comments to count in a reasonable amount of time!
Yeah, it should inflate to 15TB or more I think
If only I had the space and bandwidth. I would host a mirror via Lemmy and drag the traffic away.
Actually, isn’t the a way to decentralize this that can be accessed from regular browsers on the internet? Live content here, archive everywhere.
Someone could format it into essentially static pages and publish it on IPFS. That would probably be the easiest "decentralized hosting" method that remains browsable
Wow, great idea. So much useful information and discussion that users have contributed. Looking forward to checking this out.
thank you!!! i built on great ideas from others! i cant take all the credit 😋
Reddit is hot stinky garbage but can be useful for stuff like technical support and home maintenance.
Voat and Ruqqus are straight-up misinformation and fascist propaganda, and if you excise them from your data set, your data will dramatically improve.
the great part is that since everything is built it is easy to support any additional data! there is even an issue template to submit new data source! https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiver/blob/main/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/submit-data-source.yml
PLEASE SHARE ON REDDIT!!! I have never had a reddit account and they will NOT let me post about this!!
We can't share this on Reddit, but we can share this on other platforms. Basically, what you have done is you scraped tons of data for AI learning. Something like "create your own AI Redditor" . And greedy Reddit management will dislike it very much even if you will tell them that this is for the cultural inheritance. Your work is great anyway. Sadly, that I do not have enough free space to load and store all this data.
What is the timing of the dataset, up through which date in time?
2005-06 to 2024-12
however the data from 2025-12 has been released already, it just needs to be split and reprocessed for 2025 by watchful1. once that happens then you can host archive up till end of 2025. i will probably add support for importing data from the arctic shift dumps instead so that archives can be updated monthly.
Thank you very much, very cool.
It's literally says in the link. Go to the link and it's the title.
Oh I didn’t see it. I’m sorry I asked.
so kinda like kiwix but for reddit. That is so cool
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
You know what would be a good way to do t? Take all that content and throw it on a federated service like ours. Publicly visible. No bullshit. And no reason to visit Reddit to get that content. Take their traffic away.
What would they say? It’s information that’s freely available, no payment required, no accounts to simply read it, no copyrights, where’s the legal in hosting a duplicate of the content?
It might fall under the same concept that recipes do - you can't copyright a recipe, but a collection of recipes (such as a book) is copyrightable.
In any case, they have a lot more money to pay lawyers than you or I do, I'll bet, so even if you are right, that doesn't mean you'll have the money to actually win.
So distribute it and n a fault tolerant way. They can’t sue all of us.
Fine, decentralize it then. And fuck your ad revenue, nobody likes you, Spez!
You should be very proud of this project!! Thank you for sharing.
Thanks. This is great for mining data and urls.
How does this compare to redarc? It seems to be similar.
redarc uses reactjs to serve the web app, redd-archiver uses a hybrid architecture that combines static page generation with postgres search via flask. is more like a hybrid static site generator with web app capabilities through docker and flask. the static pages with sorted indexes can be viewed offline and served on hosts like github and codeberg pages.
Is there difference in how much storage space is needed between the two approaches?
redd-archiver will take up more disk space because the database exists along with the static html
I think this is a good use case for AI and Impressed with it. wish the instructions were more clear how to set up though.
thank you! the instruction are little overwhelming, check out the quickstart if you haven't yet! https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiver/blob/main/QUICKSTART.md
How long it takes to download this 3TB torrent ?
week(s)
Thank you for answer. I think I do this one instead https://academictorrents.com/details/30dee5f0406da7a353aff6a8caa2d54fd01f2ca1 Looks like it's divided by year-month.
those are not split by subreddit so they will not work with the tool
What's the size difference when you remove the porn stuff from the torrent?
Willing to bet a 90% size reduction
grabs external
Very cool! Do you know how your project may compare with arctic shift ? For those more interested in research with reddit data, is there benefit of one vs another?
Does this decompress the files preemptively and leave them? Or is it only decompressing as a post/subreddit is accessed? Basically i am wondering what kind of storage footprint would be required to search through this
Eww, Voat and Ruqqus.
i will always take more data sources, including lemmy!
... for building your personal Grok?
if you didn't notice, this project was released into the public domain
The Free/Libre Torment Nexus
I'd be worried about having some of the voat stuff on a hard drive I own.
I'm surprised GitHub hasn't automatically nixed the archive.
Can anyone figure out what the minimum process is to just use the SSG function? I'm having a really hard time trying to understand the documentation.
did you check the quickstart?
Yes, both the standalone quickstart and the quickstart section of the readme (which are both different).
Is it possible to get the static sites without spinning up a DB backend?
the database is required
I do not consent for this
I would sooner download a tire fire.
thanks anyway for looking at my project 🙂
I use Reddit for reference through RedLib. I could see how having an on-premise repository would be helpful. How many subs were scrapped in this 3.28 TB backup? Reason for asking, I'd have little interest in say News or Politics, but there are some good subs that deal with Linux, networking, selfhosting, some old subs I used to help moderate like r/degoogle, r/deAmazon, etc.
the torrent has data for the top 40,000 subs on reddit. thanks to watchful1 splitting the data by subreddit, you can download only the subreddit you want from the torrent 🙂
Sweet! I'll check it out.
Say what you will about Reddit, but there is tons of information on that platform that's not available anywhere else.
:-/
You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.
This one specific bug in this one niche library has probably not been written about in a book, and even if it has I doubt that book is in my local library, and even if it is I doubt I can fucking find it
obscure problems almost always have reddit comments as search results, and there's no forums or blogs with any of it anymore. be nice to have around solely for that... though I'm sure if shit like /pics or whatever else was removed it could get significantly smaller...
Boring. I want the Kuro5hin site. That was actually good and hysterically funny at the best times. ASCII reenactment players of Michael Crawford anyone?
I dont know if historic data is very interesting. Its the new content we are interested in....
You've never been looking for an answer to something and it's on an old reddit post?
How to beat a boss in a game?
Ways to do some sort of home improvement?
Discussion on a product you're considering that isn't brand new?
You are interested in AI slop and bot propaganda?
*Bot propaganda?
Sag ich doch 😁
People will do anything to use Reddit instead of just letting go.
This is just an archive. No different from using the wayback machine or any other archive of web content.
You still use Reddit in some capacity.
Or would you deny watching a movie just because you watched it on your local Jellyfin folder instead of watching it on Netflix or the cinema?
"Stop talking to my clone, I specifically requested you never contact me again"
It's an archive of reddit, not reddit
There is a ton of useful info on Reddit. I don't use it anymore either but I'll be downloading this project.
I never said I am not using it.
But that feels like it's a compromise to keep using it as native as possible.
If it was just for research purposes, accessing archive.org would suffice.
I think the idea here is to have it offline in the event of further fascist control of the internet. There is really so much useful information on there on a wide variety of topics. I don't care about backing up memes and bot drivel.
that was exactly the idea, thanks for understanding..
also reddit's ban on vpn also reddit's mandatory id verification
and the list goes on..
::: spoiler spoiler :::
Maybe read where OP says 'Yes I used AI, English is not my first language.' Furthermore, are ethnic slurs really necessary here?
Then he's no better than Reddit who also uses AI no?
How many languages do you know fluently? I get that people have a definite opinion about AI. Like I told another Lemmy user, I have a definite opinion about the 'arr' stack which conservatively, 75% of selfhosters run. However, you don't hear me out here beating my tin pan at the very mention of the 'arr' stack. Why? Because I assume you all are autonomous adults, capable of making your own decisions. Secondly, wouldn't that get a bit tedious and annoying over time? If you don't like AI, don't use it ffs. Why castigate individuals who use AI? What does that do? I would really like to know what denigrating and browbeating users who use AI accomplishes.
Wait, do you have an issue with piracy in general or an issue with the arr attack specifically? No judgement or interest in argument, just genuinely curious. Feel free to dm if you don’t want to start a whole thing, or beat your tin pan as you said, in an unrelated post.
I don't mind stating here: Piracy in general. I don't condemn those who do because, as I've said, you are autonomous adults capable of making your own decisions. You know the risks and you take steps to mitigate those risks. You and I, have both heard all the pros and cons and all the supporting arguments of both sides. Now, I know there are lots of people who rip and catalog their own DVD, CDs, etc. All fine and dandy.
The comparison was that every time AI is used here in this comm, or even suspected of use, people have a conniption and start piling on. Like moths to a flame. What does that accomplish? Nothing. It seems to just make those who are anti-AI feel superior, is about all I can get from it. To me, it's just a tool. I'll grant you it's a tool that needs some heavy regulation, even as much as I chafe against regulation. It is necessary. AI isn't going away. It's not a fad. It's here to stay. If using AI makes your blood boil, fine. Don't. Although I foresee a time where you'll use AI and not even know it.
Opinions are great too. I, like others, have a long list of them. Stating your opinions is fine too. It seems here tho, opinions turn into castigation and denigration, which is in direct violation of 'Rule 1: Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another.' State your opinion on AI: 'I'd rather guide my pops into my mum before I'd use AI'. Then move on. Personally, I don't state my opinion on the arr stack, because it would accomplish nothing and in the long run become tedious and obnoxious.
As far as the arr stack as software, I've never deployed it, but it is pretty darn amazing from what I've read. The dev teams that have put it all together have some knowledge to say the least. It's just not my bag.
Ahk I see, thanks for the explanation. I assumed it was a general issue with piracy, but was wondering if maybe I had missed something negative about the software specially or the contributors behind it or something.
IMHO, we can all co-exist under the selfhosting umbrella
Using ai to help normal everyday people cross language barriers is one of the few good ethical uses for it. I hate ai and it's implications as mich as the next gal but this is clearly fine