If my fingers prune I’m going to die or something

Why does The Register get paid? /s

The file you downloaded is a compressed JSON file, it’s not something you can really just look at. But it contains all the data needed to build a nice UI around.
I don’t know what OS you are on but on linux you can run zstd -d -c file.zst | jq . and it will print everything in the file. It’s not really readable though. Also it doesn’t have any of the media content, only the text

That assumes the mods do. I fear reddit will turn into another tinypic situation. even if it isn’t an image host there will be pages of answers on forums and stack exchange pointing to dead reddit links. The fustration of finding a 10 year old forum post of someone having the same issue as you only to have the only answer point to a dead link is incredible.

I hate reddit. But it feels like the library of Alexandria burning down (yea I know). All those google search results and educational subreddits that are shutting down forever, and because they are too small reddit won’t force open them again.
A lot are in the pushshift archive, but that cuts of at 2022. Also, it doesn’t include a lot of the smaller subreddits.
I have had my PC running 24/7 with multiple VPNs to avoid rate limits downloading as much as I can before the API dies, but with some blackouts moving forward a day I have already missed a few.
Like many others, I would often add “reddit” to the end of my searches to get better results, half the websites on web searches now are either AI generated, copies or are completely AD ridden websites that ask you to turn off your AD blocker.

I think protonmail might allow you to make a mail account without anything.

depends, If you ignore all the outgoing things, like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. Your outgoing emails will always go into spam or disappear completely.
If you follow all the outgoing things but ignore the inbound mail checking, you will get quite a bit of spam. I run my own email server and instead of blocking bad incoming emails I just send then to the spam folder. I usually receive about 2-4 spam email a day, usually it’s just marketing crap or it’s a single link with some cutout of a wikipedia article to avoid spam detectors, and sometimes it’s trying to extort you. I find it fun to read them sometimes, one time I got an email saying I missed a payment for my domain name but they got the amount of VAT wrong AND the maths on the subtotal. Some of them are comicality bad. but not quite the flood you might expect. If more people where on my email server or if I signed up to any shitty website I came across I’m sure it would be a lot worse though.

there is a UK lemmy instance now: https://lemmy.org.uk