Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

support.mozilla.org

41–50 of 782 posts

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#41

Saving links and offline reading is dime a dozen nowadays, but the one BIG feature was recommended articles, which basically opened the reading list of the world and you could read extremely interesting longform articles based on your list. It was the best magazine you could imagine. But I guess it required maintenance and moderation so they axed it - in the typical fashion of an acquired product I might say. I still…

You might be able to scrape archive sites or create search queries that you use to determine fresh or trending archives or domains?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#43
I really enjoyed https://waldenpond.press/ when it was up and running. They selected articles from your pocket once a month and then printed, bound, and mailed them to you. When I discovered the service I had a 500 hour reading backlog, and for $14/mo I was getting 100+ page books of self-curated content. They were perfect for flights, trips, and lending out. I was able to force it to include recipes as well, and I still find myself referencing them frequently.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#44

I'm strangely sad about this, even though this became yet another place for my bookmarks to go to die.

did anyone ever offer a method of detecting link rot in bookmarks automagically? i gave up on using bookmarks a very long time ago after finding so many links no longer working.

Not automatically but when you open a dead link you can ease the pain by using an extension such as "page archive" [1] to quickly search an archive such as the wayback machine and perhaps get something useful out of it.

I've always wished a browser such Firefox would extend bookmarks as an offline archive of all links you add to it. Your own personal wayback machine perhaps.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/view-page-archive/

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#45
post #21
post #4

One less thing to disable and hide on every new installation is a win.

that's what I thought. I was against the integration and had to make efforts ever since that inappropriate cash-grab. Glad to see it's dead. I wish Mozilla would find the funding to stick to being a good browser rather than this current phenomena of waiting to see what the next shitty thing they do to the software is.

There's no money in being a good browser and a minority will scream at any attempt for Mozilla to make money other than donations.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#46
post #16

I used Pocket until they remove the ability to save page as offline (moved to premium tier afak) and also shoving sponsored content here and there. I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than ~~useless~~ useful to me. [1]Raindrop.io

> I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than useless to me.

Low bar to hit.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#47
They should at least allow to download their copy of the saved articles, PDF or HTML or whatever format they save it in.

This is such a betrayal. Some old links might not exist anymore, so it's useless to only get the links.

EDIT: Betrayal, because the main reason I paid for Pocket was the archiving of articles and now I can't actually export the archived copies.

Their decision of not enabling export of the archived copies now makes it very unlikely that I'll ever pay for any of their paid services in the future.

A shame really because I like supporting Firefox as a browser.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#48

Seems Obsidian Web Clipper is a good alternative, it can save as markdown so you own the data offline. Anyone tried it? What is your experience?

I do use it, on Desktop only. On mobile I still use Pocket only. Actually I use an Obsidian plugin to sync my Pocket saves into Obsidian. That plugin might be a great backup/way-out strategy for Pocket users.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#49
post #18

> Your export file will include links (URLs) of your saved items. The export does not extract the text of saved links. Additionally, the export does not contain tags or highlights. boo! without the tags, the links will be mostly useless for me. Every now and then I thought aboyt switching to some self-hosted solution. Should've done it sooner... and I will never trust Mozilla with any service again.

> and I will never trust Mozilla with any service again. Who will you trust? Google? Apple? Microsoft? It's not like any of the other behemoths have a better track record when it comes to long-term maintenance and availability of hosted consumer products. If anything, Mozilla actually has the best track record out of them all when it comes to long-term offerings.

His point is about data portability, not service uptime.

This export feature is outright bad, worse than the industry standard by a mile. Why wouldn't it include something as basic as tags? It just forces users to write their own scripts, wasting time for everyone involved.

Post reply on HN