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

141–150 of 782 posts

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#141

Post by InsideOutSanta »

sambaumann wrote: post #99
_def wrote: 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.

anyone have any good suggestions for a self-hosted option?

I've tried all of the options: Linkwarden, Linkding, Karakeep, Shiori, Wallabag, Grimoire—you name it, I've tried it. These are all great tools, and I use Karakeep myself, but I use it to bookmark and archive links, not as a "read it later" tool.

In my opinion, no self-hosted read-it-later tool can replace Instapaper or Pocket, as they focus on providing an exceptional reading experience in a native app that works offline. None of the self-hosted tools offer a comparable experience.

So, depending on how you used Pocket, there are either better or no self-hosted options.

I wish Mozilla would open-source Pocket so it could be made into a self-hostable option.

> Wallabag

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#142

Post by hyperhopper »

JeremyNT wrote: post #134
_def wrote: 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.

Yeah this is really lame. I used it because I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands. I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction, but I think it's a shame to lose Pocket. I really like several Mozilla services (Relay, VPN, and up to now Pocket) and this shutdown along with such a half-assed export option is a real disappo…

> I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands.

Never trust a company like this. You'll always get burned. If it's not FOSS, its not reliable and will likely burn you

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#143

Post by godelski »

sureste wrote: post #25

Everytime people talked about Mozilla or Firefox the main complaint was Pocket. Everytime. Yet most people here are sad to see it go. What gives?

This is what confused me coming into this thread too! I was wondering what it'd be like consider how widely unpopular pocket is around here. Enough that anytime Firefox is brought up people point to pocket. No one defending it at those times so at just hear negatives. I'm sure there are plenty of different users but it's interesting to see what opinions dominate a thread at a given time.

I think people just like complaining about Firefox and Mozilla. Or maybe it's just that HN likes to complain in general

Either way, good news for Google I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#144

Post by tristanho »

_def wrote: 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.

You can connect Pocket to Readwise Reader ( readwise.io/reader ), via Pocket's API, which will let Reader view all the tags, metadata, highlights, etc.

Even if you didn't want to use Reader, you could then export from inside Reader and Readwise to pull out CSVs of all of your articles+highlights -- no subscription required.

(full disclosure: founder of Readwise here, obviously if you want to try our Reader app that would be sweet, but at least wanted to offer this way to get a more complete export)

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#145

Post by deinonychus »

testfrequency wrote: post #19

Super bummed about this. I know a surprising number of high profile CEOs and founders who live by Pocket, really has just been quietly reliable and simple way to reserve content for later. Despite there being so many other $apps that can fill the gap here, none of them seem to be as clean and straightforward as Pocket has been for me. Anyone here paying for Matter or Readwise? I know Instapaper may seem to be the obv…

I used Matter for a few weeks and it was fine. The email newsletter collection is interesting but it's sort of a paywalled feature and I didn't really use it much. Several other paywalled features I wasn't interested in. At the time I really wanted an iOS widget and I don't think Matter had one, so I bounced. I'm using Feedly now and really like it, especially for the suggested news RSS feeds. I get by with a free account and it feels like they don't try to convert you very often... Unfortunately the act of adding a new bookmark is weirdly slow on my phone. Maybe that's just my device.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#146

Post by gareim »

packetlost wrote: post #53
foray1010 wrote: post #8

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 use it pretty extensively. Aside from being a pretty poor experience on mobile (it straight up can't be used on iOS at all, works ok on Android), it's the best web clipper I've used. I really wish they would integrate the functionality into Obsidian itself, though I think there are technical limitations with it.

I literally just used Obsidian Web Clipper on iOS+Safari.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#147

Post by rockskon »

chimeracoder wrote: post #22
_def wrote: 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.

Chasing the ever-cycling list of organizations that haven't yet betrayed trust with regards to privacy. If you're going to go with the "who can you trust" angle then you need to qualify that with a type of product.

Also?

An organization's past doesn't dictate their present.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#148

Post by rmwaite »

_tqr3 wrote: 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’ve been using Raindrop and have used the Permanent Copy (offline) feature enough that I wouldn’t consider doing without it. It’s worth every penny if you ask me. And you can host it yourself AFAIK, I just haven’t looked into it much.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#149

Post by OliveMate »

hrnnnnnn wrote: post #14

I use pocket all the time to save articles to read on my kobo, which has a pretty good first-party integration in the OS. I wonder what Rakuten are going to do.

I'm not one for external services piggybacked onto other software, but the ability to quickly send something to my Kobo has been a godsend.

edit: I had no idea Mozilla actually bought Pocket. Mental that they're willing to shut it down

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#150

Post by onli »

micimize wrote: post #55
sureste wrote: post #25

Everytime people talked about Mozilla or Firefox the main complaint was Pocket. Everytime. Yet most people here are sad to see it go. What gives?

The complainers were FF users forced to deal with bloat they didn't use, those who are sad here are pocket users. They're just different people. Though, even those who didn't like the bundling of the extension probably didn't actively want the service to fail.

Right. I would be one of the people who saw pocket as an unnecessary distraction, but even I tested it and my opinion is partly based on pocket just not working in my Firefox at the time. I also just did not like that it was given space in the toolbar while a way more important rss button was denied that space. And despite that, I still think the shutdown now is bad - this should be spun out or be moved to a Foss project, and certainly not be killed for more ai nonsense.

BTW, fakespot (the service they also shut down) is or could be an applied ai project where that technology could be helpful, and they also shut it down. That also feels wrong, especially the combination.

Post reply on HN