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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#271

Post by mort96 »

Vinnl wrote: post #183

One thing that unfortunately never got properly announced, is that over time Pocket was slowly open sourced piece-by-piece, mostly as it got rewritten/modernised, as I understand it: https://github.com/Pocket/ I guess the fact that it wasn't a big bang source code dump made it hard to make a moment of it. (Note: open-source does not necessarily mean that it was optimised for self-hosting, which would've been a lot mo…

Kind of a bit "too little too late" when they're still open-sourcing it but by bit in 2025 after promising to open-source it during the acquisition in 2017. I'm not very impressed.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#272

Post by kepano »

I built Obsidian Web Clipper (open source, MIT) to replace my read-it-later app and save everything to local markdown files. Now that Obsidian Bases is available, it makes for a very nice web archival tool and reading experience. Here's a video:

https://mastodon.social/@kepano/114553164915046938

You can use Web Clipper with any app that supports Markdown, not just Obsidian.

Defuddle is the underlying HTML-to-Markdown library I made for Web Clipper, and can also be used as a CLI:

https://github.com/kepano/defuddle

https://github.com/kepano/defuddle-cli

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#273

Post by pityJuke »

interestica wrote: post #114

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

Was really considering using https://www.reademaillater.com/ to sync long newsletters (mainly Matt Levine, which isn't available free on the web but is via email) to my Kobo, and this sucks.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#274

Post by doubled112 »

major505 wrote: post #247
segphault wrote: post #71

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.

And Thunderbird?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#275

Post by lemoncookiechip »

I've used Pocket in combination with the In My Pocket add-on for a very long time on a daily basis. I don't particularly care about the online specific features, I don't care about syncing, or any of that. I've used Pocket specifically as a better and quicker Bookmarking tool than the browser's default to save pages I want to read later, simple as that and it worked flawlessly.

Now I'm forced to find something similar, and I found Save-to-Read which does mostly what I need, although it feels a bit jankier.

I understand why people have hated this app for a very long time and blamed Mozilla for investing into it, but to me it has always had value by doing what tools were meant to do, make my life easier, even if that's just about saving a few clicks every time I wanted to save a page or dismiss it.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#276

Post by rs186 »

I have been using Pocket + p2k for long articles that I prefer to read on Kindle. There are several issues with the setup, but this works well enough for most articles that I have sticked to it over the years. Looks like I have to find an alternative now.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#277

Post by BonoboIO »

So Mozilla is shutting down Pocket completely by July, and this is under their new CEO Laura Chambers who took over in February 2024. Meanwhile Mitchell Baker - who was pulling in $6.9M by 2022 - just bailed out entirely this February after "focusing on AI and internet safety" for exactly one year.

Let me get this straight: Baker's salary went from $2.4M in 2018 to nearly $7M in 2022, while browser share collapsed to 3.45%. During that time she laid off 320 employees (70 in Jan 2020, 250 in Aug 2020), claiming COVID despite record revenues in 2019. Then she steps down as CEO to "focus on AI," only to quit Mozilla entirely a year later.

Now the new CEO's brilliant strategy is to kill off Pocket - one of the few products people actually used that they acquired in 2017. Eight years of "investment" down the drain.

This is exactly what I mean when I say Mozilla has no fucking clue what they're doing. They're completely dependent on Google's search money, executives are getting rich while laying off workers, and their response to irrelevance is to shut down working products. The whole organization feels like it exists just so Google can point to it and say "we're not a monopoly."

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#278

Post by fdsjgfklsfd »

drooopy wrote: post #165

Pocket and other similar services always ended up becoming a virtual junk drawer for me, as I was just hoarding content to consume when I have free time, but time never realyl freed itself up and content just kept pilling in. In the end, it just became one of those annoying things that I have to disable on a new installation of Firefox.

I used the mediocre TTS to listen to text articles while driving.
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