Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 123 posts

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

#1

Post by danparsonson »

Well here we are again... it appears that the archiving function (to which I subscribe) is degraded - URLs crawled since about May 22 that landed on cache5.pinboard.in just return 404 (or in one case, garbage) when accessed; perhaps the drive is full? Anyone else noticed the same? Older links still seem to work OK.

I notice that idlewords is recently active on HN despite being impossible (for me at least) to get hold of by email - if you're reading this, would you resolve the above issue at least? Then I can finish manually scraping the archive I have built up, since I've been unable to persuade you to prepare a backup of it for me and I'm now concerned the site will go offline without warning.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

#2

Post by photoGrant »

I'm miserable about Pinboard. I loved it, I even paid extra to get a silly emoji thinking I could throw some extra money to the developer.

Except when I stopped my subscription I got locked out my grandfathered account and couldn't use it as I could before. Basically punishing me for donating.

Oh well.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

#3

Post by uniqueuid »

Pinboard is arguably the type of service that can withstand the tide of times much better than overblown posh "modern" web apps. But it's a sad truth that even the best things eventually erode and die. I really hope Maciej is doing well and doing other important things, and I hope that others pick up the crucial task of safeguarding the web in a sane way.

As for the rest of us, I stick to Cavafy:

> As someone long prepared for this to happen

> Go firmly to the window. Drink it in

> Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing

> Your first commitments tangible again

> And you who had the honor of her evening

> And by that honor had your own restored –

> Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving;

> Alexandra leaving with her lord

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

#4

Post by graderjs »

That sounds quite tragic. Must be annoying. Not sure if it's the same use case, but if you're interested in archiving links from bookmarks, my DiskerNet product does that: https://github.com/crisdosyago/DiskerNet

also there's plenty of other archiving solutions you can find online, like SingleFile, ArchiveBox, Memento, ... etc

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

#6

Post by shubhamjain »

It's hard for me to fathom why people continue to pay for a service, whose founder time and time again shown that providing a good service is least of his priority. It took me four emails and two DMs just for him to acknowledge that there was a problem back in 2019. I understand virtue of simplicity, but how much can it hurt to just make the site responsive or just fix the fucking bookmarklet so it doesn't take multiple clicks to add a single bookmark?

Archiving and full-text search are useful features, but they are so unreliable that it doesn't make sense to continue paying. Trust me, copy/pasting links in your notes app is a much saner alternative.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

#7

Post by danparsonson »

graderjs wrote: post #4

That sounds quite tragic. Must be annoying. Not sure if it's the same use case, but if you're interested in archiving links from bookmarks, my DiskerNet product does that: https://github.com/crisdosyago/DiskerNet also there's plenty of other archiving solutions you can find online, like SingleFile, ArchiveBox, Memento, ... etc

Thank you - I am indeed planning to self-host an ArchiveBox instance although I'll take a look at the others you linked too. As they say, nobody looks after your own stuff like you do :-)

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

#8

Post by danparsonson »

shubhamjain wrote: post #6

It's hard for me to fathom why people continue to pay for a service, whose founder time and time again shown that providing a good service is least of his priority. It took me four emails and two DMs just for him to acknowledge that there was a problem back in 2019. I understand virtue of simplicity, but how much can it hurt to just make the site responsive or just fix the fucking bookmarklet so it doesn't take multi…

I've always had good service in the past and the archiving feature has been genuinely useful over the years; I'm not sure what's happened in recent times.

Luckily it's a good time to self-host.

Post reply on HN