this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
658 points (98.8% liked)

Selfhosted

54534 readers
736 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 19_84@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Tiger@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

Thank you very much, very cool.