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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#451

Post by soulofmischief »

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…

I never wanted Pocket, it was forced upon us users initially and slowly made less obtrusive, but the damage was done. When I saw this headline, I cracked a wide smile; maybe there is hope for Firefox after all. I just want a browser that respects my freedom. Not a web platform with a dozen doodads and gizmos and AI review bots and weird partnerships.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#452

Post by 90s_dev »

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…

Firefox introducing tabs instantly made it more usable than IE. Then Chrome came out, and was always two steps ahead of Firefox. A month ago or so I added Firefox support for 90s.dev but for some reason they still don't support ES modules in service workers, which was a pain to work around (see https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/main.ts#L12... and https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/site/sw.ts#... )

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#453

Post by HexDecOctBin »

echelon wrote: post #416
godzillabrennus wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BRICS is a cancer on par with Google.

I won't argue on this as it's orthogonal. Sovereignty of your country's smaller businesses over monopolies, and sovereignty over data and data privacy is paramount. Every country should be trying to tear Google apart. It isn't just too big, it's a black hole that is eviscerating competition. The US, Canada, all of the members of the EU, India, and even our geopolitical rivals should be trying to regulate and/or break…

India won't. The call of the hour is re-industrialization, and manufacturing Pixel phones is one piece of that puzzle. Give employment to millions of people is far more important in the short run. And there are other ways of enforcing sovereignty.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#454

Post by frollogaston »

smitelli wrote: post #57
sureste wrote: 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?

Some call this phenomenon the Goomba fallacy.

I'm just glad it has a funny name instead of something arrogant-sounding like "Dunning-Kruger effect." That was ok in a research setting but got turned into an insult.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#455

Post by aucisson_masque »

> Why is Pocket shutting down?

> Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.

Oh yeah, it explains everything.

I wish one day a company pr representative will be bold enough to just say "we don't want to tell you".

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#456

Post by frollogaston »

advisedwang wrote: post #34
sureste wrote: 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?

Some people hated pocket, and would complain about it. Different people liked pocket and are commenting here. The community has people with different viewpoints, and you are seeing different people's comments on different stories (either because different people are commenting or because different comments are getting voted to be visible).

I hated pocket being enabled by default, that's all. I also think a lot of people saw it as adware/spyware even if it technically didn't work that way, which tbh I'm unsure of.

That doesn't mean I wanted it dead. I was happy for the feature to exist and for others to use it. Maybe some people were angry that they even wasted a few KB downloading the extra code for a feature they won't use, but I'd be ok with it.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#457

Post by pabs3 »

lillecarl wrote: post #381
Henchman21 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All my hopes are with Ladybird now

My hopes are with Servo, I like the novelty of it being implemented in Rust rather than C/C++. I follow Ladybird and appreciate their work. Especially implementing everything from standards, fixing standards and keeping it easy to follow the standards in code (and I'm proud Andreas is Swedish too). But for something with the surface area of "everything you can do with a computer and it's uncle" a memory safe language…

Ladybird is moving to Swift IIRC?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#458

Post by grues-dinner »

echelon wrote: post #391
mewse-hn wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DoJ is arguing in court that Google should be barred from paying off Mozilla because of Google's search monopoly https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...

That's so hilariously backwards. Google should be split into several business units [1], should be forced to give up Chrome [2], and should be forced to invest several billion of its war chest into competitors. That's what the DOJ would do if it still had balls. The fact that there's no money in a product like Firefox is insane . It's absolutely bonkers. There is so much value in it, yet everybody's favorite mega mon…

What's bonkers to me is that people are alway complaining about ads and they're not putting "delete web ads from your life" front and center of their value proposition. Go to firefox.com and look at the the "why Firefox" copy. It's could be about basically any modern browser. It's like selling a car with "it has wheels!".

I guess that might threaten their tie-up with the world's biggest adtech company which is why they keep it at arm's length, but that's just slow death by strangulation.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#459

Post by al_borland »

basisword wrote: post #402
al_borland wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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 was a big Instapaper user until they added Reading List to Safari. It's just enough features, it's built into all my devices, and it's the thing that keeps me using Safari too (Chrome's reading list implementation sucks).

The thing I don’t like about Apple’s implementation is the All list doesn’t show read/unread status. There is a list for unread, but not for read.

I just pulled mine up to go through it and if I had to guess I have about 5 read out of probably 250. Which 5 those are, no idea. I also find it very easy to accidentally click on an item, which marks it as read without any visual indication. I just have to know this, and then remember to right-click and mark unread.

I spent a little time this afternoon (maybe 10 minutes) looking at export options to get the data in a way I can go through it. It seems to be stored in a plist along with the bookmarks. plutil has an export option, but it won’t export to json (it throws an error), so I’m left with 150k lines of XML, which then converted to 31k lines of json. I’m now debating if I should continue down this road, or just plow through it in Safari. There are some things on GitHub, but I don’t want to run them without reviewing the code, and at that point, I’d rather write my own. Maybe I’ll use it an excuse to try out duckdb.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#460

Post by jrks11o »

0_____0 wrote: post #122
testfrequency wrote: post #19

Super bummed about this. I know a surprising number of high profile CEOs and founders who live by Pocket, really has just been quietly reliable and simple way to reserve content for later. Despite there being so many other $apps that can fill the gap here, none of them seem to be as clean and straightforward as Pocket has been for me. Anyone here paying for Matter or Readwise? I know Instapaper may seem to be the obv…

I have been using Obsidian Web Clipper to save stuff to read later. If you already use Obsidian it's worth a shot. It's not perfect but it does a reasonable job of translating articles etc. into markdown. I don't actually know if it saves images locally, I suspect not (which is probably a pretty big weakness)

it saves images locally in your vault

edit: sorry, the clipper links them

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