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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#311

Post by gorbachev »

podgietaru wrote: post #211

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 bought an Amazon Fire tablet exclusively for Pocket use as well.

Something did change maybe about year and a half ago about rendering articles. It felt like less and less of them were rendering in article mode, and I needed wifi access to read articles in the original format. Before that practically everything rendered in article mode, afterwards I would say it was about 50%.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#312

Post by input_sh »

inanutshellus wrote: post #258
podgietaru wrote: post #211

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…

Reading pro-Pocket comments is so surreal. I never really paid any attention to Pocket and never used it but 100% of the comments I ever saw were about how it was some invasion of privacy tool that was evidence of corruption in Mozilla selling your data to 3rd parties or something. Now it's dead and ... everyone here is mourning its passing. Guess I was a successful mark for anti-Mozilla FUD tactics.

I don't think anyone was opposed to Pocket-the-product, but its integration into Firefox.

I used it long before Mozilla purchased it and continued to use it for years after, but jumped ship because years went by without any updates to the product. IIRC it hasn't received a single update between approximately 2019 and 2021. It felt abandoned long before today.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#314

Post by Vinnl »

mort96 wrote: post #271
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.

It wasn't started in 2025, it's a process that's been going on for years. (Presumably, but I don't actually have more information here, the pre-acquisition codebase couldn't easily be open sourced without rewriting for legal reasons, e.g. copyright residing with someone else.)

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#315

Post by whyenot »

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.

Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#316

Post by donnachangstein »

Another feature no one asked for, meeting its technological grave. For those few users of Pocket this function could have been easily handled as an extension.

If Mozilla spent the engineering hours wasted on this toward fixing the ever growing mountain of existing bugs they might have more than 1% market share.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#319

Post by Lutger »

mvdtnz wrote: post #252
nine_k wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

How does that change the basic facts from the end users' perspective?

It doesn't, but the sentence referred to wasn't really aimed at them. I mean, Mozilla could ditch its engine and adopt chromium in order to really focus on advertising, and then it would also support said features from an end users perspective! Somehow I have a feeling that won't earn Mozilla praise.

For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When its gone, there will basically be only one left.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#320

Post by oa335 »

tristanho wrote: post #144
_def wrote: 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.

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…

Love your app. Any plans to enable reading of Readwise Reader articles on eReaders like Kobo? I’m thinking of something akin to how Pocket’s integration with Kobo.
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