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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#741

Post by illiac786 »

mort96 wrote: post #548
cosmojg wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on a similar endeavor, I doubt they intentionally dragged their feet on it. They likely had a smorgasbord of legal bullshit and technical challenges resulting from code omissions mandated by said legal bullshit that they had to muddle through.

I don't care. Don't promise to do something like that if you can't follow through. Nobody forced them to promise to open source Pocket (although that promise certainly helped the bad PR of integrating a closed source service into Firefox!).

You should care. Not holding a promise because you cannot or because you don’t want to is not the same thing. Both aren’t great but there’s a very significant ethical difference between the two in my opinion.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#742

Post by whou »

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…

Totally! I loved using Pocket when I wasn't that crazy for FOSS advocacy. I've been checking their repos and forums here and there over the years to check if they open sourced everything, since that's been a promise since 2017. Last time I checked they still just had their mobile apps open sourced. Glad to see that they've finally released the back end source code! Excited to see community progress on making it self-hostable or forking it altogether!

Surprisingly, the Pocket's recommendations were their feature I liked the most that I never saw any other open source alternatives out there. Would love to use it again if it means that I keep my own recommendation data.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#743

Post by seec »

That's a pretty good display of the nonsense of SaaS. Someone who has paid for premium will find itself with a shitty export that won't be usable without investing a lot of time into importing somewhere else or making some sort of software to exploit it.

And there is no way to prolong its useful life by keeping an old system around or make it work in a VM. Subscription software is a travesty and only cares about extracting the most money from customers. It's not even worth much in terms of compute requirements because you still need to invest in decent hardware for other softwares (that most likely won't ever be able to be fully remote).

Web software isn't bad but the hostage situation it allows is pretty bad. But then again, even Apple with their pride in native local software has pushed subscription to extract the most money possible, so... Greed is such a destructive sin.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#744

Post by seec »

rollcat wrote: post #635
ternaryoperator wrote: post #409

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…

And that's the fundamental problem with web software, regardless of its technical merit (or lack thereof).

It's crazy that you can pay something for so long but whenever they decide it's not profitable enough, you not only loose access to the hosted ressources but also to the complete usefulness of the tool.

Meanwhile there are people still keeping around computers from the late 2000s. They might not be secure for browsing the web but at least the software can still be useful.

The update everything all the time is such a perverse incentive, tech is gobbling up value that could be better invested somewhere else.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#745

Post by KingMob »

alwillis wrote: post #712
KingMob wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely not going anywhere Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps. They have every interest in getting that App Store cut, and none in extending the web with open, competing technologies. (* Maybe the recent app store legal rulings ill change things, we'll see.)

> Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps. Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish ? There's no evidence of WebKit languishing. If anything, the WebKit team has shipped important web platform features more quickly than it ever has before. WebKit is arguably the most important framework for the App Store; many thousands of…

> Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish?

Because they can make more money on apps. Like I said in the parent comment you're choosing to ignore.

> There's no evidence of WebKit languishing.

It's pretty well-documented that Safari has been a laggard when it comes to web standards, cherry-picked links aside.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#746

Post by nzp »

I was looking to replace it for quite some time now due to the Safari extension and also the website being very buggy with tags for too long. I didn’t have time to investigate alternatives, so this announcement came as a relief for me — it forced me to finally address the issue. Can’t say I’m surprised with this move, since it felt like abandonware for years now. Switched to Goodlinks and am very pleased with it for now.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#749

Post by defrost »

BaldEagle58 wrote: post #747

I have exported my Pocket data TAKE OUT and I have all my links But how do I make sense of the time_added column? Can I convet 1491409103 to a date / time in Excel?

Reading up on various time formats would be a start.

If that number is UNIX seconds after epoch and corresponds to ( Wednesday, April 5, 2017 4:18:23 PM GMT+0 )then this might help: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46130132/converting-unix...

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#750

Post by vrighter »

modzu wrote: post #433
major505 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

mozilla has been broken for a long time. spiritually and intellectually, brave is the successor

the one with the cryptocurrency bullshit?
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