What you’re describing is no longer federation but full P2P. From a purely technical point of view, it may work, but the biggest problem will be abuse (spam, excessive resource use, illegal content). When a new instance shows up, how do you know if it’s a spammer or not? And if an instance is blocked by another instance, whose side should you be on?
This is true. If you run the reddit-grab project directly without using the warrior (sudo docker run -d --name reddit --label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true --restart=unless-stopped atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/reddit-grab --concurrent 6 yourname), you can set up to --concurrent 20, and some projects do work well with higher concurrent, but not reddit. 6 is already pushing the limit.
I’m running reddit-grab on 25 VMs on azure (trying to burn my $200 free credit that expires in 10 days) and I can only run --concurrent 4 safely on most of them. The only VMs that can run --concurrent 6 are the ones in India, which seem to be soft-ratelimited by their higher latency anyway.
I haven’t tried one, but I probably won’t like it, because I often type with one hand as my other hand is busy or dirty, and having to learn what’s basicallly another layout is too much.
Even if they have the source, they may not have all the build tools anymore.
Or they have the build tools but the wizard that set up the build system back in the day no longer works there.
Or they have the build system archived and documented but it doesn’t run because some license expired, and the tool vender doesn’t sell that version anymore.
In the near future, there will be another possibility - SaaS cloud tools that are impossible to preserve so they are forever lost.