It would be a bit of a project, but the most time-consuming part is already done. /r/datahoarder has a backup of reddit comment/post history that goes from the beginning of reddit up to March of 2023 (text only, no media). It’s compressed down to about 2TB in size, but already in json format and anyone can download it, would just need some work to convert that to a format a fediverse instance could work with and somehow inject it into a new instance.
Defederating Lemmygrad seems to be fairly standard in most other instances, so in most cases, I don’t think they could cause problems if they wanted to.
Defederating for political reasons is something I want to be completely against, but I do also feel that at a certain level of… I guess extremity, it kind of ceases to be a political discussion. This is an area where I think those of us who used to spend most of our time on reddit are kind of spoiled, we were all kind of used to the ‘far left’ being defined by bernie bros and generic socialists as opposed to tankies and mao apologists.
I worry about where that line is drawn, but I guess with the fediverse, we all get to choose.
I genuinely think that ending up with a lower price as an appeasement was part of the initial plan. I think at some point, maybe too many people pointed that out for it to feel like a good plan anymore, or maybe spez started taking it personally and decided to take it off the table.
I’m about 50/50 now on whether they’re just sticking to be being stupid/spiteful or if they’ve maybe just decided to remarket reddit completely as an LLM training model. If it’s just a training model, who cares if the community isn’t happy, that doesn’t matter so much in the short term. They can prop up abandoned communities and limp along, hell even the corporate marketing & propaganda accounts talking amongst themselves might have enough value to keep things going until they IPO. Spez just has to make a plan to cash out ASAP.