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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#281
Sad to see Pocket shutting down. For anyone seeking alternatives, I've been working on Linkwarden[1], an open-source bookmark manager that hit HN's front page twice[2][3]. Plenty of other great alternatives out there too, such as Raindrop (not fully open-source), Karakeep, and Wallabag.

Also, there's an official Linkwarden mobile app in development, aiming to support most (if not all) of Pocket's key features :)

[1]: https://linkwarden.app

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942308

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856801

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#282
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?

People who are happy about something have no reason to post. You're talking about two entirely different groups of people even though they're all on HN.

That's not true, I sing the praises of things that bring me value all the time. I am, arguably, getting pretty close to "shill" category for some of them. However, I think that behavior should get a pass if the things being shilled are actually FOSS and not just "change from one company to the other"

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#283

Wow, after Instapaper went back to indie from Pinterest[1] and Omnivore closing last year this is no longer surprising. This is also proof that read-it-later app as a category is not sustainable as a venture / company backed service. This is also a category of app that I believe could be better served by local-first native apps. As there is no reason why a server has to be requirement to enjoy the full service. Your…

I actually don't necessarily think that's true - As someone that has a bit of a background with the codebase of Omnivore I think the thing that killed that wasn't necessarily the business model (let's be real, they didn't even offer a premium tier.) I think it was the introduction of features that required an unnecessary amount of processing power. Namely, RSS feeds. Their RSS implementation parsed every new webpage…

You are right. The architecture is just creating burdens and frictions to sustain the business if mostly relies on freemium user expansion. This is especially attractive to VC backed companies as they sometimes are judged by their growth when they are pre-revenue. And growth with free users is like a poisonous apple, that looks appealing but only accelerate the burning of your cash pile. To the point that it's afraid of charge money that may impact their main growth metrics.

I do believe apps like ReadWise that charges a subscription will have a more likelihood of surviving. Or Omnivore if it's less aggressive in expanding to compute-heavy features without charging.

My main point is, this is a category that's better served by local-first architecture, on Apple ecosystem, you also have the added benefit of having icloud sync for free.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the one BIG feature was recommended articles The TWO BIG features were recommended articles and integration with IFTTT. I think, of the suggested alternatives, only Instapaper has IFTTT integration (modulo setting up a local webhook). Given I have multiple things per day (and have for 10+ years) going into Pocket, this is going to be a big pain in the arse to deal with.

You could try Wallabag. It provides 3 separate RSS feeds per saved link status, that could trigger IFTT.

Ah, I'm talking about feeding -into- Pocket. I haven't found anything except Instapaper that has direct IFTTT actions for saving URLs or anything which natively supports a webhook kind of thing for saving (but I'm sure there must be something because it seems such an obvious thing to support!)

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#286
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?

I'm using & developing Omnom (read-only demo: https://omnom.zone/ ). It is self-hosted, free software, fediverse compatible and creates 1:1 snapshots of the saved websites: https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#287

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…

I have another theory, actually.

I'm also a very old user, since the first days of the service, and I don't know how many saves I have it inside (will see when my export arrives).

The latest iteration's search was abysmal, and I normally refrain from using strong words. It failed to find exact matches from titles, the words or excerpts I know that exist in the article I'm searching for, and as a result, it became a FIFO basically. Unless you consume the list directly, hitting something you are looking for was nigh impossible.

After being berated by support to use the search "properly", I started to build my own app, a TUI tool to curate the list, but it was going slow. Honestly, I'm a bit relieved now since I'm free from developing that software, and I can dig the data in my own terms.

BTW, my export is just arrived, and it's a series of CSV files which has the usual suspects as columns. I can import this into a SQLite and dive the way I want.

One less thing to worry about, but this doesn't mean I'm not bitter about its demise, too.

Edit: It turns out I have ~37K saves. Whoa.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#288

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.

something these other apps could do is run dead URLs through archive.org and nab it that way.

Not 100% foolproof but I'm willing to bet it will work for the majority of links

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#289

Wow, after Instapaper went back to indie from Pinterest[1] and Omnivore closing last year this is no longer surprising. This is also proof that read-it-later app as a category is not sustainable as a venture / company backed service. This is also a category of app that I believe could be better served by local-first native apps. As there is no reason why a server has to be requirement to enjoy the full service. Your…

Apple also has a read later service built into Safari. It’s not the most feature rich, but it has existed for several years now.

I’d be curious on the stats of these services. Myself, I save a lot of things with good intentions and then never go back to actually read anything later. For a stand alone service, this is the worst. I send them data to store, then never do anything with it. I have to imagine this is quite common, considering the amount of information coming at people every day. It’s always more than I can handle, so it’s not like I ever run out and need to head to the saved articles.

I’m looking at using ChatGPT to help me process through all of it, just to make sure there wasn’t something I actually wanted.

A few weeks ago in the HN comments someone mentioned their philosophy on it was YAGRI… You Ain’t Gonna Read It. I may have made up that phrasing, playing of YAGNI, but that’s how I remember it. Basically, if you aren’t going to read it right now, you probably never will, so let it go.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#290
Seems like official export [0] has tags and annotations along with timestamps. However in case you'd like more structured full data from the API (instead of a mess with csv + json?), you can use my tool [1] to export it. Here's example of its output [2]

[0] https://getpocket.com/export

[1] https://github.com/karlicoss/pockexport?tab=readme-ov-file#s...

[2] https://github.com/karlicoss/pockexport/blob/master/example-...

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