Here is my attempt to archive r/homelab before it went dark. Google says there about 92,400 results for site:reddit.com/r/homelab, I have 2098, that’s only about 2% of it. Maybe there is something of use to you in that 2%.
Please don’t webscrape, if you want all the data you can get the raw BDFR archive at https://archive.douwes.co.uk/reddit/homelab.tar or the live web version at https://archive.douwes.co.uk/reddit/homelab-web.tar
I get the moderation thing. I moderate a few tiny communities and the mod tools are pretty terrible. I run a couple bots but I wouldn’t even know where to start for a moderation bot, probably because I never modded on reddit.
Discord is a pain the the ass. it’s fine for chatting but support is terrible. You ask a useful question and someone posts le funny cat photo and suddenly no one ever response. It’s a bit better with threads but it’s still a chat app, not a forum. and sometimes it’s used for maintaining a list of links??? just link them on the webpage. I cannot fathom why so many communities migrated from forums to discord. literally none of the questions I have asked on big discords have been answered.
It’s a tough unpaid gig at the end of the day, hating on mods is pretty much a meme at this point in time especially on reddit and there’s a lot that goes on that 99% of users don’t see as it’s already been handled by mods or the tools in place. I know of several mods that are planning on leaving reddit entirely, not just because of the current situation (different sub BTW) as they have had enough and it’s just not good for their mental health and these are mods of over a decade.