I have considered some technical solutions, and I agree that this sub would be an excellent candidate for archiving. For now I have made a feature request at Lemmy because, let’s face it, that would solve several problems.
If they aren’t up for it, I could try and fix it some other way, but ideally it would be fixed if they would just allow for 1 more character than they do now.
Unfortunately, Lemmy cannot handle community names over 20 characters, so this won’t be possible.
Bad bot. Deploying a fix right now for this, apologies for the spam.
The bad news is that I now know why it cannot clone this subreddit - the name is too long. That’s going to take some time to fix, I’m afraid.
At any rate, “bestof” subreddits don’t work very well at the moment anyway, since they do not yet retrieve the underlying message.
That could work, but it would be terrible for discoverability. In the mean time, I put up a feature request at Lemmy. I’m not a fan of pushing my problems upstream, but in this case it would actually be the easiest solution - as far as I can see (and I have 0 experience with Rust) they only need to adjust the validation regex, because the database already allows for it. That is - as long as the ActivityPub protocol allows for it.
If they deny it, I could try something with name mapping, but you’d either end up with something that is unreadable, or something with a high collision chance. Neither option is very appealing. For now I’m just going to wait and see.