Can we just parse the whole Reddit and upload it to a separate Lemmy instance

Doing this and being successful would likely result in legal action of some sort.

That comment needs some Reddit Gold. Oh, they are getting rid of that too.

Given the sheer amount of data on Reddit, this is really not feasible nor scalable, nor is a long term solution. A simple CloudFlare configuration will quickly put an end to such a solution.

RSS exists, however only allows you to subscribe to subreddit posts, not comments.

This is why the API changes are such a big deal.

Why in the fuck would you even want to do something like that?

I get where you're coming from, but why not just let Lemmy be its own thing and hope it grows and attracts the right user base? I think I'd rather keep the two separate.

Honestly, my only use case for reddit currently is as an archive for my questions that likely have answers on reddit. A reddit archive Lemmy instance would allow me to completely stop usage of reddit, easily. I'd imagine there are a lot in the same boat.
Not sure that it's even a feasible option, but it would be welcomed. If anyone has some suggestions to solve this use case I'd be interested to hear it.
- There's no feasible way to glean that information quickly with the API changes, but a potential solution to that may come on Bing. I was reading last week sometime that they're partnering with reddit to bring longer threads to bing search results, so that would help if your concern is giving them traffic. Otherwise I can't see anyway of getting around having to just rebuild the archive organically over time here on Lemmy.
I wouldn't mind some shared content from quality communities, like the posts from the machine learning research community.
- Cross post those particular posts in niche subs yourself and hopefully that helps drive engagement. Can't hurt.

I'm not really involved or in a position to act on something like this; I'm just a user passing by. Bearing that in mind, I have a thought about this topic that your question teased out.

Reddit has become increasingly bad over the last several years with low quality karma farming, predictable shitty overused in-jokes, Facebook style content, and spam/scam bots. The recent decisions by reddit made me realize it was time to go, but that was just the straw that broke the camel's back. All of the other terribleness that reddit had to offer were the most significant causes for me. Yes, there was absolutely some amazing, informative, high quality original and thoughtful content, and I'll definitely miss that. But here there is the opportunity to make something new. Something better.

Reddit has some strong positives that can be inspirational in the fediverse, but we (in my opinion) shouldn't be trying to clone reddit here. Therefore, I don't think we should be setting up bots to crosspost everything here and eventually make this Reddit 2. Of course, others have their opinions which are entirely valid. Just adding some thoughts to this matter.

This here. I subbed to a community here that was a bot bringing over posts from the steam deck subreddit. After not being on Reddit for a while and realizing how many people it is just posting a picture of the steam deck, I immediately unsubscribed.
Unless the bot is smart enough to parse out all of the useless fluff, there isn't a point. The useful posts are so far and few in-between these days. I'm happy to be here now where the posts have quality to them.
Holy hell!

Lemmy isn't exclusive meant to replace reddit, persay. Reddit eventually evolved into a toxic shit hole, which is why I left before I even knew of Lemmy. I don't want Lemmy to just become decentralized reddit, I want Lemmy to evolve its own culture, its own community, and I hope that it does become the toxic waste land reddit has become

Per se. It’s per se. That’s Latin for “by itself/intrinsically”. “Persay” is not a word.
- Fair enough.

Seems like if you were that desperate for Reddit information it would be easier just to bite the bullet and go to Reddit. Seems like a while lot of effort for no reason

Just let go of Reddit already.

I mean reddit exists, and that would be VERY expensive.

I don't agree with the idea of wholesale copying all of reddit, but I really do like the idea of creating an instance and copying all the subreddits as empty communities, and then each of these communities can point people to the Lemmy equivalents (and block all other content).

The question is who would do this and how would it be curated?

https://lemmit.online/ is trying to archive Reddit, as are the people at r/DataHoarders (the link https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/DataHoarder/comments/146msr8/isthereacompletebackupofreddit/ will not give traffic to Reddit). https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ is an existing Reddit backup, though I don’t know how complete it is.

You should check out the Wayback machine at archive.org

Doesn't have everything, but it has a lot