Not just with subs going private, but with users purging their comments and posts along with their accounts. Just last night I was talking to a friend about something and wanted to pull up a post from a while back. Lo and behold, deleted and gone.

all attention to this mess is good imho. also remember chat gpt was trained on reddit data i until fall 2021 so should be able to pull on archived zeitgeist for a quick and dirty answer

One long-term solution would be to ask the relevant question in a relevant community on lemmy every time this happens to you. Then answer it yourself (or wait for other to), perhaps using the other site (via archive.org) as a reference when writing it up.

The important bit is to make sure the answer here is complete and not just a link to outside sources. That way it won’t disappear if those other sites go offline.

With enough people doing this we can push lemmy into those search results and build a useful & independent repository of knowledge.

Great, now Google gets fucked as well! Another win.