Mozilla Acquires Pocket

I hope this is good news.

I've been using Pocket for a couple of years, and am a top-1% user. It's been useful, though also highly frustrating, and is at best only about a 50% solution.

I've provided considerable feedback to Pocket over issues and features. Over the course of a couple of years, few if any of them appear to be addressed, which has been highly disheartening. (Any Pocket folk: I'm "dredmorbius" at gmail, though not in my account, which is otherwise attributed, because, you know, privacy, Kristalnacht, Snowden, etc., etc.)

I'd previously used Readability, which was nice in fixing a primary problem of online content: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. But that service shut down, on 30 days notice (though with loud signs for the previous couple of years) last September. I spent several days largely manually transferring information out of Readability (404 links meant that a straight export wasn't useful -- I had to track down alternative references where possible). I'm hoping I don't have to go through that again.

I've looked at other alternatives: Instapaper (no compelling use case), Pinboard.in, by our very own @idlewords (his comment below was ... not particularly useful). Upshot: without a very specific walkthrough of the product, I can't tell if it's worth my time, and my time would be a week or month of trying to reconstruct the structure I already have in Pocket, in Pinboard. I've visited the "Tour" link multiple times, and no, it isn't clear that this offers me anything useful.

I'm thinking that RMS's model of having an email-based web-requesting systsem might actually be more useful than anything else. A Mutt (or Emacs mail-mode) searchable, taggable archive, date-sorted, threadable/groupable, would be a huge win over a lot of other alternatives. I've been thinking through other ways in which I might create my own self-hosted archive repository.

Zotero is another option, though again, I can't quite penetrate the use model / workflow.

In both cases, the prospect of being stuck with as-published layouts rather than as-useful layouts (have I mentioned: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem) is disheartening.

I'd really like to have an offline / commandline tool which could manage webpage decrufting. I'm aware that it's not a fully deterministic process -- the problem with the Web, for better or worse (I've been suspecting the latter for some time) is that there are no publishing standards, and content follows no consistent form. That said, much content can be divided into two general categories: 1) known states of fucked up and 2) unknown states of fucked up. Growing the size of category one, and taking the hopeless cases and simply stripping all markup from it and starting from scratch (something I do myself, manually, far more often than I care to think) is a semi-reasonable approach.

I've written a few times on what's plaguing the Web (as have others, Maciej's rants are particulalry recommended).

Tabbed browsing: a band-aid: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...

The Reference Management Problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_ref...

And some general feedback (wrapped around some specific feedback) to Pocket: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/3eucmp_s0tumjuoxmfclbw

(Yes, it's heavy on the caps and asterisks -- it's difficult otherwise to indicate important points in email. SoKookMeHarder...)

Borrowing from that last:

Don't put solving your own problems ahead of solving those of your users.

The features I do use, heavily, and would like to see improved, are article view (many websites remain glitchy, I'm well aware this is a whackamole problem, but it does need to be continually addressed), import (I've been working through a backlog of 2,000+ Readability articles migrating to Pocket, slowly, one-at-a-time, there's no automated tool), bulk-action tools, sub-corpus tools (working on a specific set of articles at a time), and tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags (did I say tags) tags tags tags. And more tags.

A principle, perhaps the principle problem with the Web as it stands is organisation particularly as concerns quality and vetted content.

There are various sources who can vet content. Some are good. There's one I especially trust, and whose judgement over what I like is strong: ME.

I've commented before, AND CONTINUE TO HUGELY APPRECIATE several features of Pocket, especially the ability to peform full-text searches of my current and archived articles. It's HUGE.

One of my (many) interests is COGNITIVE LOAD. Pocket is a tool for REDUCING COGNITIVE LOAD when reading online media. I see several mechanisms:

1. A standardised presentation of Web content. I can look at an article, and identify what is the primary content (virtually all of it), what's metadata (usually the top -- you do a good job but I'd love to see this improved as well), and where the controls are (standard Pocket bits).

2. Elimination of online distractions. Sidebars. Ads. Animations. Videos. Spurious links. Shitty page layout. Shitty font choices. Shitty colour choices. Shitty CSS choices.

3. Format optimised for my device and preferences. I love you to tears for not having to fuck with zoom, font choices, background/foreground colour, etc., etc., etc., on Every Fucking Webpage. ("Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.") Huge. Or is that "Hyuuuuge!" now?

4. My own curation. Anything I've saved to Pocket I've seen at least once. There's a familiarity in returning to material which makes it more valuable.

5. Tags. Again, my assigned classifications for material. (And often picks selected from Pocket's tag suggestions, which are quite good.)

AFAIK, Mozilla has the structure they do because the IRS frowns upon charities (which is shorthand for "tax-exempt corporation") engaging in business-like activities but is fine with charities owning for-profit companies as a source of income (and like any shareholder can do, direct the for-profit company to benefit its owner).

Regional differences may be relevant here: in Canada, you can incorporate a nonprofit corporation and later apply for charity status (which restricts the company's possible activities in exchange for a 0% income tax rate) but it's completely optional.

In the US, on the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, one has to establish a for-profit entity first and then apply to the IRS to recognize it as a charity (which is a lengthy process). The words "charity" and "nonprofit" are interchangeable in the US for that reason.

If the concept of a non-charitable nonprofit exists in your jurisdiction, you can get the benefits of a nonprofit structure (ie. no owners) without restricting the company's activities, minus tax exemption and being able to issue tax receipts.

For context: I founded a non-charitable nonprofit in Canada; I'm not super familiar with the US side of things so I'm happy to be corrected.

Yea, I found their website : https://www.zotero.org/ Available for Windows, Mac and Linux. So no mobile apps at all, Pocket apps are great so that's a good reason to choose them over Zotero.

That certainly sounds nice but it's not true. Or at the very least depends on how you define software. If software is built upon an evolving platform (such as the web) and has a self-supplying revenue stream if it needs one at all, then it can be done and will last.

As a data point, my webapp (PartsBox.io) works best/fastest in Safari, Chrome is second, Firefox a distant and slow third. So, I'd take issue with the statement that "Chrome is the best browser available for web apps", at least on MacOS, and at least for some web apps (I know WebGL apps work better in Chrome).