What options are there and how are you transitioning?
What options are there and how are you transitioning?
About 10% of the articles I had didn't download due to Captcha requirements or paywalls that had been added since I had archived the article in Pocket. Once my articles imported to Wallabag, I filtered the unread list from 0 to 3 minutes which showed me all the ones that were paywalled or only saved snippets. I fixed them with the Wallabag browser extension, which has an option to save content direct from browser.
I now have Wallabag on my Android phone, Boox ereader (runs Android), and Kobo ereader (via KOReader). No issues and I'm liking it better than Pocket.
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 with the .lua config password string, so I was getting connection errors.
It took 80-90 mins to download 1200 unread articles to my Kobo. I haven't played with the auto sync function yet, so far I just manual sync before/after a reading session.
Fika is a place to save, discover and share content built upon 3 products:
- A local-first bookmark manager (Works 100% offline) - A feed reader: With feed discovery from your bookmarks. - A blog/newsletter platform
The only thing it currently does not have is e-reader integration yet. But you get the other 2 products bundled together which make a lot of sense.
Killer features of Instapaper for me include the kindle digest and IFTTT integration (which I use to mirror my archived articles to Raindrop.io)
They also have put some effort into making their mobile app work reasonably well on eInk displays, so it's pretty great on a Boox tablet. It has real pagination, which is a feature that I was pretty annoyed about losing in Pocket when Pocket rewrote its mobile app.
Self hosted, like four PHP scripts and Sqlite.
I still miss Omnivore, but Instapaper is absurdly far ahead of Pocket. For example, Pocket could never figure out how to store paywalled content (for which I have a subscription to), despite having deep Firefox integration (although an extension with page access should be enough) and iOS having an API for the share sheet that allows injecting JavaScript into the page being shared.
No services or set up involved, works reliably and you can keep the PDF forever.
> 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)
Here is a simple illustration of a copy & paste fail from this very page:
From html: a single sentence
> Since mozilla announced the sunsetting of pocket, I started looking for alternatives, including building a light version for my personal use. But nothing came out of my research.
From PDF: a newline split of a single sentence after light because PDF is generally too dumb to use sentences for text
> Since mozilla announced the sunsetting of pocket, I started looking for alternatives, including building a light > version for my personal use. But nothing came out of my research.
"volume needs to be the lowest possible. A minimisation problem needs two variables only and we have four in this case. However the volume and area formulas can be substituted into each other to give volume in terms of width."
Cut and pasted from three lines of a PDF I am authoring right now.
Literally a different use case. Do the steps from your actual workflow that I commented on instead of trying to find a variant where it works!
Maybe the app you use adds special PDF clutches to make a paragraph a paragraph.
I work on it when I can. I'd like to add an import from Pocket feature but I haven't had a free weekend in a while.
The project is fully open source: https://github.com/linksort/linksort
Web clipper converts websites to markdown and puts them into your Obsidian vault, and then Relay can sync subfolders in your vault to make sure you have a copy on all of your devices (even between a work and personal vault for example).
Relay is also collaborative, so I frequently clip things, clean them up a bit, and move them into shared folders (like docs pages).
I like the feeling of local-first combined with a malleable UX. Especially for the pocket use-case, offline-capable is a must for me so I can catch up on reading when I'm flying or otherwise off-grid.
[0] https://obsidian.md/clipper
[1] https://relay.md
Also no word from Kobo (Rakuten) about this. Very disappointing.
Seriously? I call bullshit. Type "pocket alternative" into your favorite search engine and you'll find a bunch of sites that recommend a few good alternatives. This is a pretty good question for reddit.com/r/selfhosted as opposed to hn, and it's well covered there.
https://openalternative.co/alternatives/pocket has a good list
https://github.com/search?q=bookmark+&type=repositories&s=st... is a good search as well that surfaces several good options (Karakeep, LinkWarden, Shiori, etc.
Personally, I went with Karakeep hosted as a docker container on my NAS, mostly because my pocket list is pretty much dump and forget and the UI and backend language looked the nicer of the top options.
Now our turn to call bs. There is no single result at the first few pages of your "favorite search engine" results that would give you a comprehensive comparison to Pocket, so you'll have to waste time with a few services to uncover how they fail at something basic Pocket has.
And all these "alternatives" lists you cite are very primitive that won't help you uncover such issues
> mostly because my pocket list is pretty much dump and forget
Ok, but you know that some people actually want to use the service to, you know, read later instead of forgetting?
Case studies in certain engineering/programming tasks, something I read that I found useful and want to have handy to share with others in the future, project ideas or notes for long-running efforts I pursue and sometimes want a "bucket to pull from" for instance.
While it's certainly true that I probably _use_ 10-20% of what I bookmark, I don't think it would be possible to realize the same positive outcomes without the 80% that I don't. (Just last week I was able to braindump a large piles of 'examples/essays I found helpful learning about neural network optimization' to one of my engineers because I'd kept them handy after they helped me.)
I should say though, I sense this is a slightly different use case than the "I want to read this article just to read it" bookmarks where I know I never will, which is certainly something I've experienced but is a minority case in my life nowadays, so I wanted to vouch for productive scenarios too.
For my Kobo, I wrote a mod that lets me redirect Pocket API requests, and a small proxy server that translates Pocket API calls into Readeck calls.
So far it's working flawlessly and my Kobo is using its built in Pocket viewer for Readeck instead. I'm hoping to open source it soon so others can use it.
I was a Pinboard user and fan for many years, although I now have some concerns over the current health of the project, and have since moved away in favor of self-hosting Linkding.
I like the privacy first approach and the web 1.0 look. The tag cloud is pretty neat too
https://github.com/ArchiveBox/pocket-exporter#-pocket-altern...
Folio lets you save articles from anywhere, has a lovely reading view, lets you listen to articles with some really nice text-to-speech voices, and access all your saves offline across all of your devices. If you enjoyed Pocket, you'll feel right at home! It’s still early days but all the core features are solid and working well.
Pocket imports are available via their API (though it’s been a little flaky lately), and I’m wrapping up file imports from Pocket, Instapaper, Matter, Raindrop, and Readwise so it should be easy to make the switch really soon.
Lots of fun stuff planned ahead. I’d love to have you join us if you’re looking for a new home!
Even a markdown export with images would be nice, but epub would be great.
Work: 1. raindrop.io 2. eagle.cool
Imported all the Pocket stuff with no issues, free plan is enough for me.
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.
The greatest feature is that it limits you to 200 items saved on free tier.
I also use https://github.com/yfzhou0904/go-to-kindle to email articles to kindle for reading on the go.
- it produces readable pages
- it produces an RSS feed that one can add to any feed reader as well
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/
For example, wallabag on iOS fails at such basics as... syncing
https://github.com/wallabag/ios-app/issues/185#issuecomment-...
BTW Pocket was nice because it saved articles so that you can read them offline with a distraction free experience (we don't do that).
Edit to add Links: https://linkwarden.app for the self-hostable app and https://apps.apple.com/de/app/my-links-for-linkwarden/id6504... for the mobile app
toomuchtodo•1d ago