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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#201
post #180
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari exists, and is quite popular.

Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.

Going purely by (mis)feature count, I'd say they're pretty similar:

https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+136,safari+18.5,firefox+...

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, unfortunately their API doesn't return the actual html content of the saved articles :( just the urls and all the metadata: highlights, title, author, image, tags, location, etc

I really wish they did :/ some things aren't even on the internet archive and are probably saved uniquely on Pocket's servers. Would be sweet if they could open source that data.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#204
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?

If you don't use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because they spent a bunch of money buying an unrelated company to add a feature you don't want. If you do use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because you don't want to be relying on a weird side project of a company because they'll do a terrible job of maintaining it and it'll inevitably get shut down.

like grape jelly and tomato soup, two great tastes that don't belong together.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#205

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 re…

> A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.

Interesting. I saw it as a glorified bookmarking service and saw the readability concerns as what raised red flags for me: mozilla just inherently isn't interested in competing on value rather than on marketing.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#207
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'm with you. I think it's great that Mozilla is trying/tried to extend their value beyond just the browser.

I found pocket immensely useful. Having the ability to have my kobo e-reader sync pocket articles to read off-line was such a useful feature.

I don't understand the Mozilla hate on this board. I think it's wildly overblown.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#208
post #180
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari exists, and is quite popular.

Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.

Sure, but fewer (sic) features is mostly a better state of affairs, and apple devices are mostly what matter if you're catering to rich westerners (as most products on this forum try to do).

To me, chromium only matters so much as I am forced to care by being employed. It offers very little to me outside of being necessary to enable the "blur" background on my video chats and offers a very shitty corporate UX.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#210
Mozilla continues to appear to not get the philosophies behind open source. If they really wanted to help people and not simply try to get market share and make money, they'd examine ways to make Pocket itself open source, including the server end of things.

"We're handing this over to a non-profit" would be nice.

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