Lawyers, platform moderation, and SEO have wiped it out. What’s left is boring drivel whose only purpose is to sell you a product or a course or avoid a lawsuit. I realize some have moved to private groups and there are still sites if you look hard enough. But is that enough?
Federation feels like the right place to bring that culture back rather than let it die or has that ship sailed?
Is there something in particular you’re looking for that you can’t find? I feel like I can find out how most anything works on the internet.
I’ve been interested in methods to scrape social media. The more measures they create to block scraping the more I want to scrape it.
I’m interested in getting datasets to play around and analyze. Personal project stuff and just to learn and upgrade myself while doing something I’m interested in.
Check out the kiwix library, it’s not social media but you can download all sorts of wiki-style sites as .zim files. Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, DevDocs just to name a few. If you have an app that can read .zim files, it’ll open them just like a wiki site.
It’s probably a lot easier than scraping social media. But if you really want to do that, there’s probably a python package for it.
If you have specific DIY projects, you’ll probably find instructions on ifixit, instructables, or wikihow. Or find some really niche hobby websites and browse their forums and tutorials.
https://cyberpress.org/10pb-data-breach-at-tianjin-supercomputer/
I would hop on tor browser and start hunting around on Torch or haytstack for subsets of that data.
Agreed, there’s even github topics for this.
https://github.com/topics/malware
Which, github itself has been host to malware in the past… https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/glassworm-malware-hits-400-plus-code-repos-on-github-npm-vscode-openvsx/
And the recent litellm exploit too was spread thanks to github https://docs.litellm.ai/blog/security-update-march-2026
So I repeat @cattywampas@lemmy.world 's question. What is it you’re looking for? Because there’s also metasploit and tor or I2p that you can use to search as well if you’d like to dig even deeper, however I would suggest atleast a sandboxed VM and VPN for that.