cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1180367
There are tools out there that help with this, but the better ones like the one I linked use the API.
I don’t know what will happen to them next month, but if you are thinking about it, keep in mind that they may not be around or work like they do today, and you may have to use other more convoluted tools.
I agree - generally speaking they’re almost certainly not actually deleting anything when they say they are, just flagging it as gone. And edits are probably stored as diffs. AND so many people have been scraping Reddit for long enough now that there’s full copies of everything you’ve posted out there already.