January 13, 2026
Drama in a data dump
Show HN: Self-host Reddit – 2.38B posts, works offline, yours forever
Reddit in a box: devs cheer, nostalgics beg Apollo, and Voat sparks a moral brawl
TLDR: A tool lets anyone self-host an offline Reddit archive of 2.38B posts (plus Voat/Ruqqus). Commenters celebrate preservation and Apollo nostalgia, clash over including Voat’s toxic history, and joke about training troll AIs—raising big questions about saving the internet’s past versus curating it.
Redd-Archiver just dropped a “Reddit-in-a-box” you can run yourself, turning 2.38 billion posts into your own offline museum. It even bundles archives from the shut-down Voat and Ruqqus. No JavaScript, mobile-friendly, and you can search if you spin up the server—think a forever offline Reddit library you own. There’s even AI integration so assistants can query posts, and yes, the data’s on a torrent section for the brave.
But the comments? Pure internet theater. Nostalgic users dream of hooking it to the beloved, now-dead Apollo app to recapture that lost vibe, while power users want a plugin to restore deleted or protest-bot-garbled comments so old threads make sense again. Archivists are applauding the “save everything” mission, but the moment Voat is mentioned, the mood flips: one commenter calls it “Reddit for neonazis,” igniting a heated ethics debate—preserve history vs platform toxicity. Meanwhile, jokesters say Hacker News will use the dump to train “reddit troll” AIs, turning the project into meme fuel. The vibe is a chaotic cocktail of digital preservation, Apollo nostalgia, and moral panic—exactly the kind of drama that makes the internet irresistible.
Key Points
- •Redd-Archiver v1.0 converts Reddit, Voat, and Ruqqus data dumps into browsable HTML archives for offline use or server-backed full-text search.
- •It supports 2.38B Reddit posts (40,029 subreddits through Dec 31, 2024), 3.81M Voat posts and 24.1M comments, and 500K Ruqqus posts, totaling 2.384B posts across 68,883 communities.
- •Full-text search requires Docker and uses PostgreSQL with GIN indexing; unified search spans all supported platforms.
- •The tool provides a REST API v1 with 30+ endpoints and an MCP server offering 29 AI tools auto-generated via OpenAPI.
- •Design emphasizes mobile-first, JavaScript-free UI, theme support, accessibility, Tor optimization, streaming processing, SEO features, and progress tracking.