Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

Over the last year or so, pinboard.in's paid archiving service has become increasingly sporadic. The process used to be nearly instant, but bookmarks are crawled maybe once a month now and frequently fail to archive correctly or are skipped completely.

From Pinboard's Twitter mentions, I can see I'm not the only one who has been trying to contact Maciej for several months without success. A lot of former delicious users are also desperate to get an export of their data, which is still unavailable over a year and a half after Pinboard purchased and shut down the site.

Overall, it's left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I decided in September to leave the service, but emailing is the only way to request a full download of archived bookmarks. I'd also like to get a refund on the next four years of my archival subscription - I paid for five years in advance because I was so happy with the site before now.

I know Maciej reads HN, and there seem to be a number of Pinboard users here (it's still mentioned just about anytime somebody posts about bookmarking). Has anybody else had any luck getting a refund and a copy of their data? What are the best Pinboard replacements, self-hosted or otherwise?

It's for this reason that I've come to view tech products as propositions for relations, and I've come to view the health or characteristics of the company as part of the value of its offering.

I've had good performance and uptime with Pinboard, but there have been a few moments that caused me to look outward for other options, but there I found that nobody else really focused on privacy the same way.

Pinboard also lost its Safari extension with no replacement in sight. The official Chrome extension also stopped working, but there are 3rd party Chrome extensions that work.

He never answered when I contacted him for pinboard support, leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.

Maciej seems to be more interested in discussing politics on Twitter rather than fixing his service, therefore I plan to leave his service once I find a good alternative.

This is an odd coincidence, I just received an email today from one of my users (I run a Pinboard "competitor", https://historio.us) that mentioned the same problems, namely emails having gone without response and an inability to get their data out.

I'm afraid I can't answer your first question, but I can answer your second one. historious has been around since 2009 and, while I don't give it amazing amounts of love, it works well enough that I use it myself. I am currently trying to modernize it a bit, but I don't have an ETA or roadmap on that. However, I think it's worth giving it a shot.

From the FAQ of pinboard.in (http://pinboard.in/faq/#anxieties):

> What happens if the guy who runs Pinboard gets hit by a bus?

> The bus is likely to be fine. They don't go very fast and are designed with passenger safety in mind.