Before the blackout I saw some of the posts about helping archive.org to store all reddit, and AFAIK they completed it.
Also, checking stuff to deploy lemmy and help the project I stumbled upon the problem I’ve seen a lot of us have: we search for solutions on reddit.
Most of the times is just to read, not to actually create a post, so I created this addon for Firefox to automatically ask web archive for the page instead of reddit.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-to-wayback-machine/

A few caveats and stuff I’ll improve later,
It forces to old reddit since new reddit doesn’t load everything at once so the snapshot is incomplete.
It forces all the times you search reddit, so if you want to actually visit reddit to interact you need to disable the addon.
It doesn’t handle the case when there’s no snapshot :P
It’s only for Firefox because it uses webRequests, I don’t know yet how to implement this using MV3 to upload it to the chrome store.

  • glorbo@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    This looks great! Any plans to open source it? Not that it’s all that hard to pop open the .xpi to be fair.

    Also minor suggestion: it looks like the archive.org API always returns non-HTTPS URLs (e.g. https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=https://old.reddit.com/r/programming gives http://web.archive.org/web/20230612074029/https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/). Might make sense to switch the protocol for the minor security boost.

    • pe1ucaOP
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I already have the repo, I’ll just update some stuff (tho I guess it irrelevant since the history will still be there haha).

      The url comes directly from web archive, I guess since we know https works then I can force it. Not sure if it should be better for the user to set this up in Firefox.

    • pe1ucaOP
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s Web archive taking a bit of time to load the snapshot, probably a screen/notification about the progress would be nice.

  • megane-kun@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    First of all, thank you for this. I just tested it out and it works fine.

    I’ve just got a bit of a concern, however. If the use of this wonderful add-on spreads, wouldn’t we be putting a lot of pressure on archive.org?

    • pe1ucaOP
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      1 year ago

      Yes, it might increase the load to archive.org.

      Similar to lemmy, it’ll be a time to optimize the stack and for more people to be aware of the its usefulness so with the banner they have when you look at a snapshot everyone can easily donate.

      • megane-kun@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I see, thanks!

        I oftentimes have to read or look at R*ddt threads, and I while I don’t want to give Steve Huffman more money through my eyeballs, I also don’t want to unnecessarily burden archive.org (since I can’t yet support them).

        Again, thanks for answering my question.