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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#242
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?

Pocket was pushed pretty heavily and basically shoved down the throat of Firefox users. Many obviously complained about this behaviour, either because they had no use for Pocket or already had a different solution. Mozilla was basically mimicking Microsoft behaviour of just forcing products/features onto it's users.

Shortly after the Pocket launch Mozilla stopped pushing Pocket and it became less visible in the Firefox UI. Now it's just a tiny grey button most don't click. So you're either use Pocket and like it, or you don't even think about it.

The main complaint, as I remember it, was mostly how Mozilla positioned Pocket. Some people picked up Pocket over the years, many liked it. These are not necessarily the same people who objected to have Pocket thrown in their face.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought as well. I wonder what Kobo will do in response to this announcement.

Me too, I hope there will be a replacement with the same low friction. I've been using IFTTT with RSS feeds to add serialized stories to my Kobo as they release.

They should be able to change it with fairly minimal changes. I managed to modify some things to proxy articles from Omnivore to it, and the functionality remained largely the same across the two services.

They'd have to implement some kind of login, but they they should just be able to build some kind of converter between whatever format and the format that is expected by the Kobo device.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#244

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.

Code? For self-hosting? I hope not. Most programmers shouldn’t be programming internet-facing stuff. (FWIW I include myself in “most programmers”).

Get it from your repository. In that case you are trusting somebody like Debian or Redhat. They’ve earned an awful lot of trust.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#245
A read-it-later app. Pocket, you had one job. Just one job. And for a while that was my killer app on mobile. But, as we see, the enshitification of the web continues.

"What began as a read-it-later app evolved into something much bigger. After Mozilla acquired Pocket in 2017, we invested in building our content curation and recommendation capabilities so people everywhere can discover and access high quality web content. While Pocket is shutting down, we will continue to invest in this promise—through the New Tab experience, our email newsletter, and more."

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would be awesome if your app could scrape the actual pocket pages.

I'd sign up for a paid version of yours if it had that feature. But I'm not sure how many others premium users would do the same.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#247

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…

Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects.

Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#248
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every other browser You can just say Chromium

Safari exists, and is quite popular.

Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform.

Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#249

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…

> available in every other browser

Isn't it because almost every "other browser" reuses the Chromium engine? Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#250

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/Podg…

I'm with you, I use Pocket all the time on my Kobo as well - I need to cobble together some self-hosted alternative. Did you find another alternative besides Omnivore?
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