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

191–200 of 782 posts

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#191

Post by marapuru »

interestica wrote: post #114

Kobo (ereader) + Pocket was always just an amazing and low friction combo. This blows.

Yep, this got me hooked on pocket as well. I had/have so many articles on there that ar easy to read on a bus / train / plane or in bed before falling asleep.

And the reasons to shutdown are pretty lame. “ But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.”

It worked for me? And probably at least hundreds or thousands others?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#192

Post by rchaud »

The writing was on the wall for Pocket when paywalls started to go up everywhere a few years ago. By that point, it could no longer scrape articles reliably.

Before that, it's Discovery feature was great for surfacing long form writing on the Net, but even then there were issues because they'd pull a lot of content mill slop from Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and there was no real way to block domains. Finally, when the good "new media" outlets started shutting down, Pocket's content library went down with it.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#193

Post by homebrewer »

reaperducer wrote: post #101
walterbell wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who will you trust? Your-self-hosted?

Your-self-hosted? Only if you're among the .0001% of people who can code it yourself. Otherwise, nothing is different; you're always relying on someone else for their software, feature, security, and compatibility updates.

I'm self-hosting a couple of services that stopped receiving updates (including security updates) about 10 years ago. They still serve my needs perfectly well. They're hidden behind HTTP authentication (with HTTPS) so the internet noise ("AI" shit, web scrapers, shodan, script kiddies) doesn't even know they exist.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#194

Post by jujube3 »

kristofferR wrote: post #162
candiddevmike wrote: post #17

They bought pocket for at least 5 million, what a waste of money.

$5 million is pocket change.

No, it's Pocket change. Which could be better spent on the CEO's salary!

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18b6tdp/mozilla_c...

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#195

Post by subarctic »

saeedesmaili wrote: post #173

This really hurts. All my content consumption workflow depends on Pocket, I shortlist from my rss reader (inoreader) directly into pocket, then ot gets synced with readwise reader automatically where I listen to the chosen articles [1]. I also use my pocket account's archive as a collection of the articles and writings I have liked (planning to build a personal and simple content recommendation system for myself). [1…

What are you going to replace it with?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#196

Post by uxcolumbo »

tristanho wrote: post #144
_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 w…

So your app will also import the archived copies from Pocket? It's mainly about importing archived content from links that might now be dead.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#197

Post by thayne »

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…

Mozilla's track record of shutting down projects is almost as bad as Google's. I wouldn't count on any of their non-Firefox projects lasting very long.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#199

Post by jonotime »

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?

Oh man. I have been working on a side project just for this purpose. The aim is to create a pocket like experience (with additional functionality like handling other media types) that is local first, unhosted, and more future-proof (no lock in).

All data is stored entirely on your device, and you have the option to sync it to your own storage provider like dropbox. This means you don't need to have the technical know-how to setup and maintain a server.

Its not usable yet, as I have rewritten it several times, but in the current iteration it is a client side PWA, so cross platform. Just started a new job so had to take a break for a bit.

Follow if you are interested (I need to update the Readme): https://github.com/jonocodes/savr

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#200

Post by deepthaw »

tristanho wrote: post #144
_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 w…

seems to work better with https://fabiensanglard.net/rss.xml than most readers although it still gets 403s fetching images but I'll still give it a run to see how it works for me.
Post reply on HN