I was a premium user of pocket for almost a decade before mozilla bought it and I remained a user for another few years after the acquisition. Mozilla turned it into garbage that didn't even do it's job properly and it is a bit sad to see it shut down.
Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#62Well, crap. I've had a Pocket account for more than ten years. It's a key feature on my Kobo devices, to boot. I hope Kobo manages to find some alternative provider for similar functionality, rather than just dropping it altogether. EDIT: Oh, and worth noting that this product will officially die before Mozilla fulfills its promise to open source it, back when they acquired Pocket. Thanks, guys.
Pocket has pretty much exclusively been a, “send article to Kobo” button for me thanks to the integration.
I doubt my now-ancient Aura One will be getting a firmware update to replace Pocket, unfortunately. Might be time to either look at alternative firmwares or see if Rakuten does trade-ins on newer models.
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#63Might save someone a few clicks: https://getpocket.com/export
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#64I am worried about Firefox Sync now, hope it survives
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#65Finally, it was so annoying in my browser
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#66What is a good alternative?
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#67I 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 s…
If I’d have known about them sooner, they’d have all my money.
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#68A little surprised to see the sadness regarding something that seemed to be universally scorned whenever it was brought up. I never tried it and don't really have an opinion, but why couldn't this functionality be created as an extension (possibly connecting to a 3rd party service? I don't know why that would be necessary. Can extensions throw stuff into firefox sync?)?
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#69~90% of HN commenters who mentioned Pocket in the last decade or so have been complaining about Mozilla's wasted effort on Pocket and how no one asked for it and how it was just another Mozilla "scam" and now that it's being removed, ~90% of the comments are "sad" and "I used it a lot."
The two opinions aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
I used and enjoyed Pocket, but never paid a dime for it so I can’t imagine that Mozilla made much if any money off of me. That’s probably true for most users, and as such it’s not difficult to imagine that Pocket ended up being a bad purchase for Mozilla in terms of diversifying income.
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#70Saving 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?
I think it's really hard to replicate the "people save this article for later" pedigree without actually having this information.