I'll miss it dearly.
I use it to sync articles to kobo, almost daily.
I don't even knew they were thinking on pulling the plug. I don't know of any alternatives. I'll be happy to self host if I can sync with kobo.
Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
571–580 of 782 posts
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#572Earlier 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…
That's indeed the bane of this category of apps. You save it but don't ever go back. Yet we all intuitively want to use it as we can never allocate the right mental space at the right time. Our brain usually are in the browsing mode when we are on social, and needs a slightly different mindset when we are ready to dive into a long read. I believe there are path forward with this category of apps though. Capturing is…
> You save it but don't ever go back.
I have a thing which picks 10 random unread "old-ish" links from Pocket (via my local DB) and emails them to me. (Used to be an iOS Shortcut but Pocket's API got in the way and I turned it into Go on my server instead.) Quite handy for surfacing things you've forgotten about but the linkrot in older saves means it's sadly often useless.
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#573Super 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…
Matter user here. I love the app, currently on the paid plan.
It has some nice bells and whistles (reading articles to you, highlights, etc) but it does the core job of saving articles for reading really well.
I’m not a pocket user so it may or may not be a good substitute but worth trying. I wish Matter worked on the kobo but there’s no API AFAIK (they do have a few of their own integrations with Obsidian and Readwise).
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#574~90% of HN commenters who mentioned Pocket in the last decade or so have been complaining about Mozilla's wasted effort on Pocket and how no one asked for it and how it was just another Mozilla "scam" and now that it's being removed, ~90% of the comments are "sad" and "I used it a lot."
~99% of comments like this continue to fail to realize the simple fact that there is no contradiction in different people having different opinions.
And if you're keeping stats, try to find at least 1% of "hypocrites" who claimed it was a "scam", but are now "sad"
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is the MZLA Technologies Corporation a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation a wholly owned part of the Mozilla Foundation.
How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.
It's a "we want to sell something, but non-profits aren't allowed to do that" trick. And it means the for-profit subsidiary has to pay normal taxes.
OpenAI is structured the same way, so they can sell access to their models. At least until it switches to being entirely for-profit, if that is allowed to happen.
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#576I you looking for an alternative, Flus[1] from FreshRss creator
Marien Fressinaud is great and FOSS !
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they…
> having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk
the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy!
I think it's more easily explained by incompetence. Esp. when stop words like 'of' and 'the' are somehow included in the index. These are almost trivial to remove prior to indexing (any decent indexing library, such as lucene, would have a prepared list of stop words filter, and it's not like you even need to do any work to have it!).
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#578I 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…
That's so unfortunate--I've also used Pocket for a decade+. I had the Omnivore app installed on my phone as a replacement for the other infinite feed scrolling apps. I'm actually working on an open-source alternative at https://curi.ooo if you're interested in checking it out. It's a work in progress, but I'm building it primarily for my own use because I'm frustrated with all these services shutting down. The Kobo i…
That's great!
I've been looking for something for a while. Great features from my point of
view:
- email newsletters, especially with offline mails (no remote images) since theya can go easily through workplace gateyways for those of us who work in secure areas. Didn't see yet if yours were.
- sync and integrate with everything, e-readers, nextcloud, browsers...
- PWA
Good luck!
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#579I 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…
It's ironic that the device that is supposed to facilitate reading(e readers) makes it so hard to read articles from the web.
I feel like there should be an easy and common file transfer protocol, like a more straightforward bittorrent,FTP,MTP to exchange with these devices.
Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot
#580> This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs...
I wish they had closed this announcement with more optimism.