well... idk about just giving away peoples private messages, and personal communications. But yes, anything that was public and linkable on the site should obviously still be available for posterity sake. I get the impression this initiative is to get users back their personal information from the site.
Hopefully they're still planning to also make the rest of the public content accessible as a mirror somewhere.
Hah, I just recovered some data from a banned account. It's kind of nice, because it at least contained my comment from when we sang Bohemian Rhapsody in the "Kid drugged up from dentist" thread.
Hello. I am Jay Ridgeway. The person processing the historical digg data. If you did not receive the data you expected, please send an electronic mail to support@digg.com with a) your digg username or address and b) a description of the problem. I will see what I can do.
Looks like they still aren't able to get the old digg and comment information out. The returned JSON had stories I had submitted going back to 2006 but nothing else. Good on the new owners for at least giving this a shot though and letting people get something out.
I participated on digg.com sporadically, and only when drunk; nevertheless, I can confidently attest that none[1] of the content in my 'archive' was ever associated with my digg.com account (and therefore, obviously, none of the actual posts and comments I made on digg.com are present in the archive).
[1]: except this one specific bit: "user":{"username":"masonmark","user_id":"298680"}
Mine contained maybe 2-3 stories I submitted. The rest (~100) are obvious spam stories that I never even upvoted. The separate "saves", "comments" and "submits" were all empty for me.
What they give you is very incomplete. Ironically all the data in my 'archive' was from 2010 right before the v5 collapse with all the stories about digg's own fate.
I'd much prefer if they provided the data to the internet archive rather than one-by-one providing information to users.