# Pushshift alternative: what still works in 2026

Pushshift ingested Reddit's public stream from 2015 and made it queryable through a free API. Reddit restricted third-party access in 2023, Pushshift lost the privileged ingestion, and the public API was withdrawn. The tools built on it (Removeddit, Unddit, Camas) died with it, and pre-2023 datasets can no longer be regenerated from the same source.

## The four replacements
- **PullPush**: closest free equivalent, mirrors the Pushshift API and offers a search frontend. Partial coverage after 2023, tight rate limits, variable uptime. Good for spot checks, not for evidence.
- **Arctic Shift**: large periodic dumps for offline research, plus limited API-style access. Needs storage and batch processing; no sub-second lookups.
- **Historical Pushshift dumps**: still circulated through academic torrents, valid up to the 2023 cut-off only.
- **THINKPOL**: independent archive, 30 billion posts and comments back to 2005, still collecting, new content queryable in about ten seconds, deleted and removed content retained, sub-300ms full-text search, REST API and MCP. Commercial.

## Choosing
Pick by the failure you can least afford: cost (PullPush), a moving dataset (Arctic Shift dumps), or missing evidence and slow lookups (a complete archive). Never report a negative result from a partial source as an absence of fact.

Source: https://think-pol.com/pushshift-alternative