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

Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

support.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 782 posts

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#71

Post by segphault »

I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.

I'd probably be applauding the decision to shut this down if I thought they were doing it to free up resources to increase their focus on the browser, but Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise, so I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration and other stuff that nobody asked for.

Meanwhile, Firefox is still missing proper support for a bunch of modern web features like view transitions and CSS anchor points that are available in every other browser.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#72

Post by madeofpalk »

ummonk wrote: post #37
chimeracoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.

iTunes Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping. I never trusted Apple after they got rid of that /s

Apple's problem is they'll often leave products to be stagnant. Existing, but on life support. Like basically all their Mac Apps. A lot of hardware products like this as well, like HomePods.

They have a raft of iOS apps that seemingly come out of hackathon projects that they release, never update, and then maybe quietly kill off. I thought they killed Clips, but it's still hanging out there...

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#73

Post by uxcolumbo »

Are they going to refund money to Premium users who recently subscribed or renewed?

EDIT: As pointed out below, it's covered in the link.

"On July 8, 2025, Annual subscriptions will be cancelled and Annual users will receive a prorated refund automatically to the original payment method."

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#75

Post by lastofthemojito »

wenbin wrote: post #23

One issue I've had with read-it-later apps is that I end up accumulating far too many articles and never actually reading them. Now my approach is simple: if I see something I want to read, I either read it immediately or never.

For me, this is just browser tabs. Modern browsers seem to do a good enough job with both persisting tab state between sessions and not expending tons of resources on idle tabs. So I just pop the article of interest up in a new tab and leave it there until I get back to it.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#76

Post by frereubu »

vinayan3 wrote: post #9

I'm very sad about this. The one feature that I really like is that you could read articles offline. Any good alternatives? (saves this HN post to Pocket to come back to it later to see replies)

I've been using Instapaper for years and have always been very happy with it.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#77

Post by jonas21 »

asadotzler wrote: post #54

~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."

This is a perfectly reasonable distribution once you consider that only a small fraction of people who really care about something are motivated enough to comment about it.

There's a small group who complain loudly about Pocket, a small group who are really sad to see it go, and probably a much larger group that either doesn't know what Pocket is or doesn't care enough to write a comment.

It's important to keep this in mind when reading online discussions in general.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#78

Post by huhkerrf »

Truth be told, my relationship with Pocket has dipped significantly over the years. According to my email, I signed up for Read It Later in March of 2011, which coincided with the release of their Android beta. It was the first thing I installed on every new browser or phone, and for many years, my end of the year recap had me at the top 1% of readers.

I'm not sure if I changed, the web did, or what, but I'm not sure I've saved anything to Pocket in 2025, and probably just a handful in 2024.

But still, to Nate and the Read it Later/Pocket team. Thank you.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#80

Post by xz18r »

I have used Wallabag[0] for read-later articles for many years. Very happy about it. I host it on a VPS but they offer a paid instance[1] themselves for $9/y. And otherwise you can use something like Pikapods[2] which is also dirt cheap.

[0] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag [1] https://www.wallabag.it/en [2] https://www.pikapods.com/apps

Post reply on HN