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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#211

Post by podgietaru »

I loved Pocket. I used it nearly daily. I was often in their top n% of users. I paid for it. Then one day they changed the way their rendering worked on iOS. And it destroyed my workflow.

I also bought a Kobo E-Reader specifically to use Pocket with it. In short order I found an open-source alternative - Omnivore - and spent my time hacking away at my Kobo to get it to pull from there instead. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter

I think Pocket was amazing. I think the idea worked amazingly for someone like me, who is an enjoyer of reading, but had a hard time finding a moment to sit down and do it.

I am upset that Pocket is going. I am upset that Omnivore shut down. I am upset that my Kobo will probably remove that integration and thus ruin my Self-Hosted Omnivore's integration with it.

I think it could have been a lot, lot more.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#212

Post by brianjlogan »

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…

Been using readwise. I quite like it. I'll gladly pay the price if it means preventing encrapification down the road.

It does everything that I liked out of Pocket and Omnivore.

It also has a neat sync feature where all my notes/highlights get saved to my Obsidian.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#213

Post by brianjlogan »

NewsGotHacked wrote: post #158
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 have been paying for readwise for about a year and a half now. I was a pocket subscriber for years before they got bought out by Firefox. All that said, I wouldn't call myself an advanced user of either (tag a lot less than I would like, want to revisit more than I do, etc.). I am reasonably satisfied with read wise as a replacement/upgrade to pocket and will continue to pay for it for the time being. My least favo…

I only use Reader. What's the other for?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#214

Post by IIsi50MHz »

thayne wrote: post #180
zymhan wrote: 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.

However, WebKit exists elsewhere.

On mobile, I somewhat like Sleipnir browser for various configurable UI niceties unrelated to WebKit. I like the way it displays tabs as a scrolling strip of buttons, instead of making me open a "manage tabs" UI.

I configured a different user-agent string[1] to make some sites happy or to get some sites to neither force a dumbed-down "mobile view" nor spam demands that I use their mobile apps.

It has a small selection of plugins/extensions, mostly written by users.

Occasionally, a captcha will get stuck in a loop, so I'll have to try Opera[2] or Firefox. Or a Google site will sometimes refuse logins.

. o O ( I don't bother with Sleipnir on desktop, because it's buggy, quixotic, and nothing like the mobile version. )

[1] There's an optional UI button for switching UA string among Sleipnir's desktop or mobile ones, or your own custom string.

[2] The only mobile browser I've tried that can always convince a site to load is desktop view. Some Google sites try Very HardTM to force a mobile experience.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#215

Post by burnte »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #121

There are a ton of bookmarking software, and good, and self-hosted. - karakeep - grimoire - omnivore - wallabag - linkwarden I myself use RSS reader / bookmark manager that I wrote [1]. Everything is open source. Even data [2] [3]. Links [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive [2] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database [3] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

I've been wanting a tool that does exactly one thing, keep the bookmarks of Firefox and Chrome synced on my local PC. I don't want collaboration, distributed, cloud first, SaaS, friends, notifications, tags, AI, or anything else. Any suggestions for a tool like that?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#216

Post by podgietaru »

interestica wrote: post #114

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

I used this a lot, and had a tool specifically to replace it with another service. I see others created a fork too. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter

They'll probably remove it now, and I am devastated about that, because I still use it pretty often with my Self-Hosted Omnivore.

I might see if I can find a way to prevent updates in the future. Or hopefully they just hide the Menu Option and keep the code intact so that I can use KoboMenu to re-enable it.

If anyone from Kobo is reading, please just hide it - don't remove all the code - thanks.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#217

Post by geordieboozer »

The think I liked about pocket was the integration with my Kobo ebook reader. I could browse the web on my phone or laptop and "add to pocket" for later, then could fire up my ereader and read the articles formatted nicely on my epaper screen.

Would be nice if Kobo supported some other service, but a bit of a stretch to imagine they'd support something self hosted or an open standard for such things

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#218

Post by burnte »

plorkyeran wrote: post #115
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?

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.

This is exactly correct. And everything happened exactly as written!

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#220

Post by podgietaru »

temp0826 wrote: post #68

A 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?)?

I used it to save things, and read it on multiple devices. The readability view was never my chief concern.

There was also a period in the history of Pocket where they had influential people share their stories, and shared the top stories on the Web. It was these things that I loved about Pocket. It was a fairly easy way to get a view on the most interesting stories that other people were talking about.

I have had such a hard time finding replacements for this workflow. I built an RSS Reader into Omnivore (Separate from their implementation) to try to emulate it, but it obviously wasn't the same.

Pocket had a lot of potential, and in an era of fragmented media companies - and the paywalling of everything I really think there was an interesting business model around unifying things or acting as a quasi-publisher.

It could have been so much, and in the end it just died. Mismanaged. It's a sad story.

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