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Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

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Re: Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

#81

Post by leakycap »

mi_lk wrote: post #24
crinkly wrote: post #22

If you have an iPhone, just use reader view, then print it but don’t select a printer and then share it. A PDF pops out. Then shove that in iCloud Drive or on your phone and read it later. No services or set up involved, works reliably and you can keep the PDF forever.

if you have an iPhone just use Safari's Reading List. It syncs with iCloud https://support.apple.com/en-us/108970

As much as I like Reading List, I think the key benefit of the PDF approach is...

> works reliably and you can keep the PDF forever

I have a ton of Apple devices and maybe my Reading List is just messed up, but it doesn't seem to keep an offline cache that is reliable in any way and would be hard to search or organize (unlike the PDFs)

Re: Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

#83

Post by polo »

dctoedt wrote: post #75

Readwise.io FTW. Saves all kinds of online stuff. The iPhone & iPad apps sync seamlessly and have quite-good text-to-speech recognition for most of it — which is great for listening to longer articles in the car / at the gym. I've got the paid version. https://readwise.io/

+1 for Readwise. I moved to their Reader app from Pocket long ago and never looked back. The app goes from strength to strength and the Readwise team also does a great job engaging with users.

Re: Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

#84

Post by sprior »

I depended heavily on Pocket for over a decade as a free user. It started to get bogged down with about 20k bookmarks. I used to spend hours manually tagging saves and the search function never seemed to actually return results. This time around I wanted a self hosted solution.

I looked at Walabag and Shiori before I decided on Karakeep. I just didn't like the UI of the first two. I already have an Ollama server and the AI tagging feature of Karakeep is far better than Walabag's, in fact the tag management feature in general is. And Meilisearch adds a really fast search engine to Karakeep that has allowed me to discover new value to the 16k bookmarks from Pocket after cleaning down from the 20k I exported, it's super impressive.

Now the less great news, Karakeep is much newer and less mature than the other options and currently only supports a SQLite backend and I really hope that changes. The only API for Karakeep goes through its web interface and so I don't think I even could export all my bookmarks. If the data was stored in a standalone real database like MySQL or PostgreSQL other options would be possible.

The AI tagging is AMAZING but it generates a LOT of tags and that makes the tag management screens in Karakeep difficult or impossible to use because they are overwhelmed. I am looking forward to the next and future releases which aim to help with this.

I use the Android app which works really well.

Karakeep does make your server into a web crawler and because of the little war on AI LLMs we're experiencing these days an unfortunate number of websites have started to fight all crawling. Karakeep uses a SingleFile browser extension which allows you to prove you are a human or log in to a website and then capture a page and submit it to Karakeep. This is a little awkward because you may end up bookmarking something once using the regular Karakeep extension and then see that you didn't get what you want and have to do it again via SingleFile. I'm hoping that at least a config list will be added so that the regular Karakaap browser extension will automatically invoke SingleFile for websites known to block bots.

Re: Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

#85

Post by crabmusket »

floundy wrote: post #39
politelemon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the import to kobo happen?

I installed KOReader following these instructions: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Ko... Wallabag plugin is built into KOReader. Launch KOReader by clicking the icon it puts in your Kobo library, then in the menus you will find Wallabag config. I added a "Wallabag Articles" folder for it to sync to. Note if you use a password manager, my password had a double quote which I believe messed wit…

I've really got to be brave and try KOReader one of these days. I used Pocket because it was the one service supported on my Kobo. I don't want to replace the hardware, but I am mildly annoyed by the locked down and slow software.

Re: Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

#88

Post by sdrothrock »

nchapman wrote: post #77
sdrothrock wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Folio actually copy the content (i.e. if the original article is removed, Folio still has it) or does it function as a collection of bookmarks that it changes the presentation of?

Yes, we copy the content. We store both the original HTML and a copy of the extracted text as markdown. The text is what is synced to your device.

Thank you for answering! I'll be giving this a shot sometime :)

Re: Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

#89

Post by MattTheRealOne »

extr0pian wrote: post #5

Wallabag. I switched from Pocket to Wallabag years ago because I didn't like sponsored content and ads in Pocket. I originally started paying for it as a subscription directly from wallabag.it, but then I started self-hosting it. Wallabag has an option to import all of your articles from Pocket too. It's a fantastic service.

I also switched to self-hosted Wallabag. I won’t have to worry about the service deciding to shutdown again.

Re: Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?

#90

Post by Brajeshwar »

I stopped using Pocket, Instapaper, and the likes in my ongoing effort to be able to walk out[1] whenever I want/need to. I tried out and still wanted to have something that keeps archives of the content I like to read. That is also largely resolved with Archive.org.

So, I end up with just a plain-text of some of the links I want as bookmarks. If they shut down or go away; its fine.

I have tested a few similar app. I'm currently happy with a minimal foot-print of Shiori.[2] I tried and liked the UI/UX of Readeck[3] better but it has its own convoluted saving and sharing (public) style and way of working. I didn't want to deal with that.

Shiori saves a local copy (my default), and I can read it later. I also default it to public share so I can share with people asking for similar topic and such. It is a single Go binary with support for sqlite3, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and MySQL as its database.

Most of the online services such as archivebox.io, raindrop.io, readwise.io, and the plethora of other replacements are cheap enough but I've been long enough on the Internet to know that I have to deal with the loss yet again.

Here is an example of Shiori Saved and Shareable article https://read.oinam.com/bookmark/39/content

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/

2. https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

3. https://readeck.org/en/

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