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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

support.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#731
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMO search is garbage in all Mozilla products. E.g. Thunderbird ignores potential matches in quoted mail text. That's utterly useless if one remembers a certain mentioning by the other side. Plus, now and then repairing the index suddenly leads to matches -- when is the right time to repair? I don't now -> always if it's seriously important...

Thunderbird search is bad enough that I just open up the Gmail website to find an email. At this point I don't even know why I use a local email client, except maybe 25 years of muscle memory.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that archived page: "A forever home for your collection" Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.

SaaS rots faster than the bits on your spinning rust. The incentive structure tends to drift away from a corp's long-term strategy. If you don't own it, you don't own it. Even the bits you own rot faster than brick and mortar. It's just the nature of the universe - cosmic rays, magnetosphere, etc. Doesn't help that the integrated circuits are smaller, and hence much more brittle with each generation. And do you even…

Agreed, except none of those things (Saas, hardware, etc.) explicitly promises you a forever timeframe. That's really what I'm poking at--the promise, rather than the reality, which you quite accurately describe.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#733
post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the guy from whose line said: You don't need a million dollars to do nothing. Look at my cousin. He’s broke and he doesn’t do shit.

I think you mixed up Ryan Stiles and Diedrich Bader, though now I wonder if Diedrich ever went on Whose Line when Drew Carey was hosting.

You're absolutely right.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#734
It is about time

With search and search history so powerful and handy, when did we go back to a bookmark or pocket saved item?

Now with AI it's even more irrelevant, those days of FOMO is over

Information is at our fingertips and we can get to it in any time, it's the new ERA!

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#735
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMO search is garbage in all Mozilla products. E.g. Thunderbird ignores potential matches in quoted mail text. That's utterly useless if one remembers a certain mentioning by the other side. Plus, now and then repairing the index suddenly leads to matches -- when is the right time to repair? I don't now -> always if it's seriously important...

See, now "local repository search" is one of those things that you would think that somebody would use one of the LLMs for.

Alas, that would be "useful" but not Unicorn Lottery Ticket Useful and so will never get implemented.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#736

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 was a user for so long I used to call this app instapaper.

Apologies if I'm missing a joke, but Pocket used to be called "ReadItLater". Instapaper still exists and I imagine they're about to get an influx of Pocket refugees.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Vivaldi after 23 years of Mozilla. Could not be happier.

Another Vivaldi user here, who "grew up" with the old pre-Chinese Opera... Sadly Vivaldi is also dependent on Chromium, and will also have to lose Manifest v2 support when that time comes.

That a browser either maintain your own entire browser engine or you can't support additional types of extensions is a false dichotomy. Vivaldi chooses nto to support it just as much as the choose to integrate VPN, an email client, RSS, Atom, a completely custom UI, and probably other things I'm forgetting that Chromium doesn't ship for them.

What is changing is what Chromium will maintain, what Vivaldi decides to continue supporting is their own choice. My guess is it will be more random crap as well, but not because Chromium is/isn't supporting those things.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#738

I really enjoyed https://waldenpond.press/ when it was up and running. They selected articles from your pocket once a month and then printed, bound, and mailed them to you. When I discovered the service I had a 500 hour reading backlog, and for $14/mo I was getting 100+ page books of self-curated content. They were perfect for flights, trips, and lending out. I was able to force it to include recipes as well, and I s…

Also a previous user of waldenpress - it was amazing to have the pocket backlog made so tangible. Now that pocket is packing up, it'll make it even more difficult for WP to re-start.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#739

I really enjoyed https://waldenpond.press/ when it was up and running. They selected articles from your pocket once a month and then printed, bound, and mailed them to you. When I discovered the service I had a 500 hour reading backlog, and for $14/mo I was getting 100+ page books of self-curated content. They were perfect for flights, trips, and lending out. I was able to force it to include recipes as well, and I s…

Also a previous user of waldenpress - it was amazing to have the pocket backlog made so tangible. Now that pocket is packing up, it'll make it even more difficult for WP to re-start.

I built something quite like this with epubs for another read it later service. There are lots of them!

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#740
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…

It would be really amazing if you could attempt for those who've connected Pocket to pull the data of all those saved files etc into Reader. I realize it wouldn't necessarily work as some stuff is just gone, but it would be a nice feature for those of us moving over.
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