I wish Mozilla would find the funding to stick to being a good browser rather than this current phenomena of waiting to see what the next shitty thing they do to the software is.
I've been a massive user since Read It Later. I used to get year-in-review emails telling me I was in the top 1% of users. For a period of several years, I read an astounding amount via Pocket. It is very tightly intertwined with my time on HN, as most headlines I'm interested in get immediately saved to Pocket.
My usage dropped a lot when I stopped commuting via the subway (where offline was critical), and a lot of my media consumption switched to podcasts, over time. I always thought Pocket could have gone multimedia, and in a world in which they supported podcasts, I would have loved to have everything in one spot. Newsletters, too.
But, I'm not surprised that the end has come, considering they stayed in their lane. Also, if the Google default search gravy train is about to disappear, this is one of the consequences. The idea that Tab Groups are a replacement is laughable.
I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could live on as a community project?
Alternative is using iOS share with Obsidian.
I really wish they would integrate the functionality into Obsidian itself, though I think there are technical limitations with it.
(saves this HN post to Pocket to come back to it later to see replies)
I wonder what Rakuten are going to do.
edit: I had no idea Mozilla actually bought Pocket. Mental that they're willing to shut it down
I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than ~~useless~~ useful to me.
[1]Raindrop.io
Low bar to hit.
Adding to that, all i want is a download current page to read offline, sort of like pdf (embedded image and styles) but on reading mode.
HN does not support whatever markup you are trying to use. You have to use Unicode:
“I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than u̶s̶e̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ useful to me.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18b6tdp/mozilla_c...
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.
Who will you trust? Google? Apple? Microsoft? It's not like any of the other behemoths have a better track record when it comes to long-term maintenance and availability of hosted consumer products. If anything, Mozilla actually has the best track record out of them all when it comes to long-term offerings.
Your-self-hosted?
Only if you're among the .0001% of people who can code it yourself. Otherwise, nothing is different; you're always relying on someone else for their software, feature, security, and compatibility updates.
- people who _can_ code it themselves, or
- people who believe they can get AI to code it for them
people who can decide if somebody else's code is "good enough" to host it themselves
I really hope we someday have self-hosting that isn't as intimidating, that isn't a million different systems all complex in their own way, where there's a base platform with base assumptions and base tools, that let's us manage our self-hosted apps & their data.
Get it from your repository. In that case you are trusting somebody like Debian or Redhat. They’ve earned an awful lot of trust.
Google has very good/complete Takeout data for most of its services.
Apple's problem is they'll often leave products to be stagnant. Existing, but on life support. Like basically all their Mac Apps. A lot of hardware products like this as well, like HomePods.
They have a raft of iOS apps that seemingly come out of hackathon projects that they release, never update, and then maybe quietly kill off. I thought they killed Clips, but it's still hanging out there...
Apple is a bit of a weird case because historically they've been a hardware company first and have done very little in the way of consumer services. But they're just as happy as to kill off consumer products if they want to; they just have a more limited selection to start from (which is itself another layer to the "problem" of trying to use them as a replacement - you can't rely on a product they don't offer).
This export feature is outright bad, worse than the industry standard by a mile. Why wouldn't it include something as basic as tags? It just forces users to write their own scripts, wasting time for everyone involved.
Also?
An organization's past doesn't dictate their present.
Have been hosting it for years, there’s a browser extension and a phone app by a third party developer as well.
I also tried readeck for a while but went back to lindking because of missing features
There’s also linkwarden
https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden
Too colourful for me, can’t like the design
And there’s also karakeep
AFAICT Linkding is a bookmarking app, much like Pinboard, not a read-later app like Pocket.
Also, linkding offers a way to read it later by using the singlefilextension https://linkding.link/archiving/
In my opinion, no self-hosted read-it-later tool can replace Instapaper or Pocket, as they focus on providing an exceptional reading experience in a native app that works offline. None of the self-hosted tools offer a comparable experience.
So, depending on how you used Pocket, there are either better or no self-hosted options.
I wish Mozilla would open-source Pocket so it could be made into a self-hostable option.
> Wallabag
I know there are services that offer more, but if I look at how I __actually__ used them, this does the trick.
All data is stored entirely on your device, and you have the option to sync it to your own storage provider like dropbox. This means you don't need to have the technical know-how to setup and maintain a server.
Its not usable yet, as I have rewritten it several times, but in the current iteration it is a client side PWA, so cross platform. Just started a new job so had to take a break for a bit.
Follow if you are interested (I need to update the Readme): https://github.com/jonocodes/savr
I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction, but I think it's a shame to lose Pocket. I really like several Mozilla services (Relay, VPN, and up to now Pocket) and this shutdown along with such a half-assed export option is a real disappointment.
Never trust a company like this. You'll always get burned. If it's not FOSS, its not reliable and will likely burn you
For most people, Mozilla is just the company developing Firefox and Firefox is the Mozilla product. Mozilla's pivot into the web's hero is coming at the price of Firefox and people are not happy. Their current situation where they depend financially on Google just doesn't feel right. And I understand that Google has been asked to stop financing Mozilla. Tough times will be coming for them
I found pocket immensely useful. Having the ability to have my kobo e-reader sync pocket articles to read off-line was such a useful feature.
I don't understand the Mozilla hate on this board. I think it's wildly overblown.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250321050043/https://getpocket...
Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.
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 would be sweet, but at least wanted to offer this way to get a more complete export)
While your app seems nice on first glance the 10$ a month is not a small amount for non americans. 10$ a year I could stomach.
Totally hear you on price.. Reader is built for people who spend a lot of time reading and can justify it (and the sub also comes with access to our Readwise product too).
We also have a 50% off discount for students as well folks in countries with depressed currencies (eg India, South American countries, etc) which might help.
We try our best, but are also bootstrapped and have to charge enough to keep the company sustainable!
I really wish they did :/ some things aren't even on the internet archive and are probably saved uniquely on Pocket's servers. Would be sweet if they could open source that data.
I'd sign up for a paid version of yours if it had that feature. But I'm not sure how many others premium users would do the same.
Not 100% foolproof but I'm willing to bet it will work for the majority of links
However, there is a wide range of eink devices that already exist that run Android (check out Boox, Meebook, Daylight, though there are many others) -- we've optimized Reader to run great on these devices :)
What is contained in the export file?
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 contain tags or highlights.
You can tell it's a rushed edit as "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 contain tags or highlights." reads very unnatural.
Via Wayback Machine, it can be easily verified that the old versions of it, both the one edited very recently or the old ones in 2024, said "does not contain tags or highlights".
https://web.archive.org/web/20250415002842/https://support.m...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250522175656/https://support.m...
Fields are: title, url, time_added, tags, and status
The tags field is a pipe-separated list of tags
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 obvious migration path, but since my landlord is kicking me out, maybe it’s time I move to a more robust solution.
I'd love to know where to migrate my Pocket data. The funny thing is that I had "Migrate Pocket" on my calendar for June 30th.
And are you serious that the exported data doesn't have the tags? Really?
I wonder how a database like this has no value, especially with the customization power brought by AI. Didn't Mozilla think about selling the product?
I am reasonably satisfied with read wise as a replacement/upgrade to pocket and will continue to pay for it for the time being. My least favorite part is it needs 2 apps/extensions for full functionality (readwise and reader). It works but feels clunkier to me than it needs to be.
However, if you're just looking for a replacement for Pocket, you only need the Reader app/extension and it shouldn't be clunky at all.
It's only if you want our highlight-specific reviewing/exporting functionality that you would also need the Readwise app... still not ideal, but merging two complex products like this without making the experience janky/complicated for new users is a really really hard problem!
It does everything that I liked out of Pocket and Omnivore.
It also has a neat sync feature where all my notes/highlights get saved to my Obsidian.
I still wish for something like this with privacy in mind and community maintained.
I think Instapaper was another solution in this space that may have the info you want.
Maybe ask on some data hoarder subreddits about how to find new content that’s relevant to your interests with existing social proof?
I can see how the data from Pocket would have made that a lot easier for you, but finding a quick solution may be difficult. I think Apple News has a bit of social components around surfacing popular content, but that is not the same as user generated content indicating interest in a specific site, which is your goal.
Are you familiar with MetaFilter? There a community that might have some insight into your question, as they’re like HN but somewhat more crunchy and broadly less technical, but very human. Asking around other communities, you might find some suggestions.
Please let me know if you find a solution because this is an interesting problem, and I would probably be just as interested in the solution.
The TWO BIG features were recommended articles and integration with IFTTT. I think, of the suggested alternatives, only Instapaper has IFTTT integration (modulo setting up a local webhook).
Given I have multiple things per day (and have for 10+ years) going into Pocket, this is going to be a big pain in the arse to deal with.
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).
BTW, fakespot (the service they also shut down) is or could be an applied ai project where that technology could be helpful, and they also shut it down. That also feels wrong, especially the combination.
I think people just like complaining about Firefox and Mozilla. Or maybe it's just that HN likes to complain in general
Either way, good news for Google I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The vast majority of people using Firefox don't care at all.
And then the people are significantly affected, the Pocket users, are going to be the loudest in this thread.
My explicit point was about perception bias.
My point was about how this bias is often undermining ourselves. In this case, helping Google chrome.
It just seems worth pointing out. That the comment sections in Internet forums seem to preference comments that compilation.
You're talking about two entirely different groups of people even though they're all on HN.
This is also related to Cunningham's Law.
Look at this thread, I've never heard so much positive talk about Pocket in my life. Up until it's imminent demise nobody had any strong inclination to talk positively about it.
Shortly after the Pocket launch Mozilla stopped pushing Pocket and it became less visible in the Firefox UI. Now it's just a tiny grey button most don't click. So you're either use Pocket and like it, or you don't even think about it.
The main complaint, as I remember it, was mostly how Mozilla positioned Pocket. Some people picked up Pocket over the years, many liked it. These are not necessarily the same people who objected to have Pocket thrown in their face.
I'd have had no problem with pocket if it'd been an optional plugin. Or, if it'd been optional at all. If I wanted to go around disabling a bunch of browser bloat, I wouldn't be using Firefox.
It’s a nice setup. I’ll miss it. There’s not a great replacement, either. Even if I create a GoodLinks-to-epub pipe or something, now all those articles will be mixed in with my books and magazines. I don’t want to have to pick through a hundred random articles to find the next book I want to read.
Mozilla, hear me out: what if, just what it, you drop some of the AI stuff you’re blowing cash on that people who use Firefox often actively dislike? Could you shave a percent off that and use it to fund Pocket instead?
> Mozilla never did reveal how much they paid for Pocket, did they?
They raised a series B for $5M if that helps ballpark it for you.
I hope Kobo manages to find some alternative provider for similar functionality, rather than just dropping it altogether.
EDIT: Oh, and worth noting that this product will officially die before Mozilla fulfills its promise to open source it, back when they acquired Pocket. Thanks, guys.
I doubt my now-ancient Aura One will be getting a firmware update to replace Pocket, unfortunately. Might be time to either look at alternative firmwares or see if Rakuten does trade-ins on newer models.
Any opinion on using wallabako vs koreader? koreader might involve some more steps to sync it looks like?
This is such a betrayal. Some old links might not exist anymore, so it's useless to only get the links.
EDIT: Betrayal, because the main reason I paid for Pocket was the archiving of articles and now I can't actually export the archived copies.
Their decision of not enabling export of the archived copies now makes it very unlikely that I'll ever pay for any of their paid services in the future.
A shame really because I like supporting Firefox as a browser.
I used and enjoyed Pocket, but never paid a dime for it so I can’t imagine that Mozilla made much if any money off of me. That’s probably true for most users, and as such it’s not difficult to imagine that Pocket ended up being a bad purchase for Mozilla in terms of diversifying income.
I did subscribe to Pocket Premium for a while but it wasn't really worth the money (plus they were being arseholes when I was asked for API support.)
There's a small group who complain loudly about Pocket, a small group who are really sad to see it go, and probably a much larger group that either doesn't know what Pocket is or doesn't care enough to write a comment.
It's important to keep this in mind when reading online discussions in general.
I'm in the "didn't really care either way" camp. Pocket was not something interesting or useful to me, but I could remove it from the UI so its existence also wasn't annoying to me.
Also: They are users of their own product
There was also a period in the history of Pocket where they had influential people share their stories, and shared the top stories on the Web. It was these things that I loved about Pocket. It was a fairly easy way to get a view on the most interesting stories that other people were talking about.
I have had such a hard time finding replacements for this workflow. I built an RSS Reader into Omnivore (Separate from their implementation) to try to emulate it, but it obviously wasn't the same.
Pocket had a lot of potential, and in an era of fragmented media companies - and the paywalling of everything I really think there was an interesting business model around unifying things or acting as a quasi-publisher.
It could have been so much, and in the end it just died. Mismanaged. It's a sad story.
I'd probably be applauding the decision to shut this down if I thought they were doing it to free up resources to increase their focus on the browser, but Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise, so I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration and other stuff that nobody asked for.
Meanwhile, Firefox is still missing proper support for a bunch of modern web features like view transitions and CSS anchor points that are available in every other browser.
most features are useless design clutter (view transition being the poster child) or privacy nightmares pushed by google for their ad business (all the way back to full url referr to floc)
You can just say Chromium
https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+136,safari+18.5,firefox+...
To me, chromium only matters so much as I am forced to care by being employed. It offers very little to me outside of being necessary to enable the "blur" background on my video chats and offers a very shitty corporate UX.
On mobile, I somewhat like Sleipnir browser for various configurable UI niceties unrelated to WebKit. I like the way it displays tabs as a scrolling strip of buttons, instead of making me open a "manage tabs" UI.
I configured a different user-agent string[1] to make some sites happy or to get some sites to neither force a dumbed-down "mobile view" nor spam demands that I use their mobile apps.
It has a small selection of plugins/extensions, mostly written by users.
Occasionally, a captcha will get stuck in a loop, so I'll have to try Opera[2] or Firefox. Or a Google site will sometimes refuse logins.
. o O ( I don't bother with Sleipnir on desktop, because it's buggy, quixotic, and nothing like the mobile version. )
[1] There's an optional UI button for switching UA string among Sleipnir's desktop or mobile ones, or your own custom string.
[2] The only mobile browser I've tried that can always convince a site to load is desktop view. Some Google sites try Very HardTM to force a mobile experience.
Update: Downvoted for facts, stay classy, HN!
Webkit, at least, builds on a lot more platforms than you think. Take a look at https://build.webkit.org/#/builders
I'm seeing at least three other MAJOR platforms:
• GTK-Linux-64-bit-Release-Build
• PlayStation-Release-Build
• Windows-64-bit-Release-BuildI use it occasionally, only for debugging purposes though.
It's a bit ironic that Webkit started as KHTML, a component of KDE, but eventually made its way to GNOME when a Gecko-based Epiphany became hard to maintain.
Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.
At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.
The only lesson Google took from the Microsoft browser monopoly was "make sure the browser doesn't suck ass". So, Chromium will continue to be technically competent, enough that they can lull people to sleep and mine their personal data in ways that should horrify us all. Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.
Google's goal is to push ads and you can see that with everything their doing. Manifest v3 castrates adblockers and their attempts to remove 3rd party cookies would stifle any competition in adtech.
That would have been a very fruitful relationship, but they couldn't make it work. My understanding is - albeit its second hand - that they really didn't want to simply jump to Chromium, but Firefox proved far more complicated to do what they wanted to do.
Ultimately, Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike, which is a real shame, but I know it would have significantly boosted usage numbers of Firefox and its engine, which in turn would drive more investment into Firefox itself.
Electron apps have no stake nor impact of any kind in the results of browser market share. None.
It's yet another 2.8k line specification solely authored by Google employees, introducing a brand new complexity monster (clones of ghost elements represented as a pseudo-element tree) to... make it easier to add fancy animations.
Now what I really miss is a "disable CSS animations" button. I find them very distracting and an unnecessary burden on battery life.
Interesting. I saw it as a glorified bookmarking service and saw the readability concerns as what raised red flags for me: mozilla just inherently isn't interested in competing on value rather than on marketing.
it is designed to be profitable.
My rss feeds are still around from then. Glad I didn't invest in this fad.
Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.
https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
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 monopoly is pouring value into commoditizing everything to keep eyeballs and attention and dollars and a taxation regime the size of a medium-sized country in its gravitational singularity.
Google is an invasive species in every market. We need the EU/DOJ/BRICS equivalent of Chicxulub-level regulation to end its throat-grip predation on everyone.
[1] Six "Baby Bells", or "Tiny Googs": Search, Android, Deepmind, Cloud, YouTube, Ads. Shuffle everything else into another bin or spin it off independently. Waymo, etc.
[2] You could put Google with the Ads business as there is (1) no synergy between Chrome<->Android<->Search anymore, and (2) if Ads fucks it up, it doesn't kill the broader browser market or web ecosystem.
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 up Google.
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 feels like the right choice.
Just a knee-jerk opinion since I'm not a browser dev and existing sandboxing seems to work well enough, but an opinion nonetheless.
As someone who grew up on Netscape Navigator, the current situation gives me flashback to how Netscape had to die so Mozilla could be born...
It's not long until Brave won't be able to support Manifest V2 as Google has every interest to kill it completely.
Isn't it because almost every "other browser" reuses the Chromium engine? Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here?
For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When its gone, there will basically be only one left.
i used it a good amount earlier, when it was relatively new, but then some issues happened, which I don't remember clearly, then i stopped tracking it.
Current Opera is owned by a Chinese company with ties to pay day loans and other shady behaviors.
i googled:
Yes… 12 years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl...
They are quite different now.
For example, the WebKit team shipped :has() in March 2022. Chrome shipped in August of that year and Firefox even later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33646121
Short answer: yes.
Here are some web platform features Chrome and Safari (desktop and mobile) are shipping but not Firefox:
* Container Style queries: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* @scope: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* Picture in Picture: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* View Transitions: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* Cross-document view transitions: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
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 FIFO basically. Unless you consume the list directly, hitting something you are looking for was nigh impossible.
After being berated by support to use the search "properly", I started to build my own app, a TUI tool to curate the list, but it was going slow. Honestly, I'm a bit relieved now since I'm free from developing that software, and I can dig the data in my own terms.
BTW, my export is just arrived, and it's a series of CSV files which has the usual suspects as columns. I can import this into a SQLite and dive the way I want.
One less thing to worry about, but this doesn't mean I'm not bitter about its demise, too.
Edit: It turns out I have ~37K saves. Whoa.
perch.app is the newest entrant to this space, and it's the closest I've seen to getting this right.
How do you send articles to it?
Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.
And blockchain integration after that.
While strictly speaking it is not “always”, Mozilla has, in the colloquial sense, always been an internet advertising company. But they have mostly outsourced the advertising to Google.
lack of investment in gecko and dropping marketshare of firefox will result in more and more compatibility issues over time (which further accelerates dropping marketshare), until they're eventually forced to become another chromium based browser
EDIT: As pointed out below, it's covered in the link.
"On July 8, 2025, Annual subscriptions will be cancelled and Annual users will receive a prorated refund automatically to the original payment method."
/s
But i think (hope) this is a good thing. Mozilla has been too distracted and needs to get their head in the game.
I'm not sure if I changed, the web did, or what, but I'm not sure I've saved anything to Pocket in 2025, and probably just a handful in 2024.
But still, to Nate and the Read it Later/Pocket team. Thank you.
[0] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag [1] https://www.wallabag.it/en [2] https://www.pikapods.com/apps
I think a smarter move in this context is to pass the product (even much simplified) to a company that can maintain it.
But yes, instapaper is still alive.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/instapaper-is-leaving-pint...
The pages were listed as ‘Pocket’ source, and they windowed the original article in a pocket page with ads
/s
I've been using IFTTT with RSS feeds to add serialized stories to my Kobo as they release.
They'd have to implement some kind of login, but they they should just be able to build some kind of converter between whatever format and the format that is expected by the Kobo device.
And the reasons to shutdown are pretty lame. “ But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.”
It worked for me? And probably at least hundreds or thousands others?
They'll probably remove it now, and I am devastated about that, because I still use it pretty often with my Self-Hosted Omnivore.
I might see if I can find a way to prevent updates in the future. Or hopefully they just hide the Menu Option and keep the code intact so that I can use KoboMenu to re-enable it.
If anyone from Kobo is reading, please just hide it - don't remove all the code - thanks.
Hopefully this situation encourages more contribution and improvement to tools like these.
- karakeep
- grimoire
- omnivore
- wallabag
- linkwarden
I myself use RSS reader / bookmark manager that I wrote [1]. Everything is open source. Even data [2] [3].
Links
[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
Focus on making a decent browser and let extensions be extensions.
I didn’t like Pocket, so I worked on my own link archiver years ago [0].
UI inspired by HN, a list of links you saved + tags filtering. Plain and simple, less features but does the job for me. I’m actually looking for users to try it out as I have not yet publicized it that much.
[0]: https://ulry.app
However, for years the design has been going the completely opposite direction of what I expected. The focus on more random content instead of my own articles is not what I wanted to see.
Pocket is probably one of my oldest online accounts. I'll be sad to see it go but I guess it was already kind of dead for a few years now.
Amazing opportunity here for a really simple and focused read later app to take the reigns.
Seems like Mozilla is dead-set on grinding up any good will they get from users.
[1]: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/pocket-source-code/43686/11 [2]: https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-monorepo
The one constant of "save your favorite articles and websites offline, forever" apps seems to be that they're... very much not forever.
In my view, this not being a native, interoperable feature of web browsers is a failure of the web. I'll be able to listen to a podcast episode I've downloaded as an MP3 forever, and the same goes for ePub books (if they don't have DRM in any case) – so why is the same so hard for blog posts and articles?
I stopped paying premium and migrated to a self-hosted Wallabag, which doesn't have all the features I want but hey, in hindsight it was the right decision.
It would be cool if they open sourced the code, but one can only dream.
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 more work, of course.)
Now for better local bookmarks.
Before that, it's Discovery feature was great for surfacing long form writing on the Net, but even then there were issues because they'd pull a lot of content mill slop from Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and there was no real way to block domains. Finally, when the good "new media" outlets started shutting down, Pocket's content library went down with it.
"We're handing this over to a non-profit" would be nice.
Not sure how complete it is. But appears to have a typescript backend included.
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/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter
I think Pocket was amazing. I think the idea worked amazingly for someone like me, who is an enjoyer of reading, but had a hard time finding a moment to sit down and do it.
I am upset that Pocket is going. I am upset that Omnivore shut down. I am upset that my Kobo will probably remove that integration and thus ruin my Self-Hosted Omnivore's integration with it.
I think it could have been a lot, lot more.
It was hard enough going from Pocket to something else, I didn't want to do that again.
I actually have a Supernote now, and side-loaded the Omnivore App onto it - so I use my Kobo less (though still somewhat at night due to the backlight.)
I never really paid any attention to Pocket and never used it but 100% of the comments I ever saw were about how it was some invasion of privacy tool that was evidence of corruption in Mozilla selling your data to 3rd parties or something.
Now it's dead and ... everyone here is mourning its passing. Guess I was a successful mark for anti-Mozilla FUD tactics.
I used it until their dreadful redesign in 2023.
I got a _lot_ of use out of Pocket.
The biggest problem for me was that they just completely gave up on paywalls, at a time when viable workarounds finally became widely available (e.g. iOS share sheet extensions being able to inject JavaScript into Safari to collect the content, which is what many alternatives do). Completely useless for reading paid news.
I used it long before Mozilla purchased it and continued to use it for years after, but jumped ship because years went by without any updates to the product. IIRC it hasn't received a single update between approximately 2019 and 2021. It felt abandoned long before today.
Something did change maybe about year and a half ago about rendering articles. It felt like less and less of them were rendering in article mode, and I needed wifi access to read articles in the original format. Before that practically everything rendered in article mode, afterwards I would say it was about 50%.
Would be nice if Kobo supported some other service, but a bit of a stretch to imagine they'd support something self hosted or an open standard for such things
This is also a category of app that I believe could be better served by local-first native apps. As there is no reason why a server has to be requirement to enjoy the full service. Your computer is fully capable of interacting with these webpages directly....
On Apple ecosystem, there are few alternatives one can migrate to. I also created an app that target this category (and more) called DoubleMemory: https://doublememory.com that has a few different takes as well:
- no registration needed (icloud sync)
- no extension required (just double command + c)
- launches from menu bar as a launcher, in a stunning Pinterest-style waterfall grid
It's all free to use with no limits, as i'm still working on paid features. I'll work on a pocket importer for these who are interested in migrating.
I think it was the introduction of features that required an unnecessary amount of processing power. Namely, RSS feeds. Their RSS implementation parsed every new webpage - a large percentage of which would never actually be read.
They hosted on Google Cloud using things like Cloud Functions. A good proportion of articles were parsed using Puppeteer, when a cheaper shorter running HTTP Request would have sufficed. The PDF viewer they used cost an arm and a leg.
None of this is to shit on the legacy of Omnivore, because I think with the team they had they built an incredible product. But I think there was a lot that could have been done to reduce monthly costs, and that there could have been more effort to monetise.
I paid for Pocket (without using premium features), and I donated to Omnivore, but the thing is ... I happened across their community whilst doing / building something else. I wouldn't have known donating / subscribing were even an option if I didn't. I'm sure I'm not the only kind of person who subscribes purely based on the fact I get value from the software.
I'd like to believe there's a viable business model around these sort of things. And honestly, a much less ethical version of me says that there absolutely is when it comes to Data. I don't think it'll ever be mega profitable, but sustainable? Sure. The Omnivore team was like 2 devs and open source contributors. I believe you could get to a point where it'd be able to sustain that team.
I do believe apps like ReadWise that charges a subscription will have a more likelihood of surviving. Or Omnivore if it's less aggressive in expanding to compute-heavy features without charging.
My main point is, this is a category that's better served by local-first architecture, on Apple ecosystem, you also have the added benefit of having icloud sync for free.
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 common, considering the amount of information coming at people every day. It’s always more than I can handle, so it’s not like I ever run out and need to head to the saved articles.
I’m looking at using ChatGPT to help me process through all of it, just to make sure there wasn’t something I actually wanted.
A few weeks ago in the HN comments someone mentioned their philosophy on it was YAGRI… You Ain’t Gonna Read It. I may have made up that phrasing, playing of YAGNI, but that’s how I remember it. Basically, if you aren’t going to read it right now, you probably never will, so let it go.
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).
I believe there are path forward with this category of apps though. Capturing is just step 0. Self-organizing so retrieval is super easy is step 1. Condensing and summarizing information are also possible with local models or MCP.
I do have to say I am reluctant to even try it because the idea of essentially hijacking the copy shortcut really makes me anxious.
Especially because I often press command c multiple times to ensure the thing I want is registered. Using that as a trigger sounds like it would punish me.
I’d normally brush this off, but here the entirety of the pitch is centered around the idea of that command, rather than its value prop.
Hope this gives some insight!
With that said, you can disable this double copy trigger easily, it's an menu bar option if you right click the icon. Also there are other ways to capture: share sheet, service menu, drag and drop into the app icon or into the menu bar icon.
On ios, it doesn't have this double copy magic obviously, so it just functions as a normal pretty read-it-later app. Hope that clarify things!
I don't think you even need apps for that. I don't need to save everything forever but I do want to save articles to read offline, after transferring them to the phone:
- I transform the page into an epub thanks to browser extensions (for example this one: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saveasebook/>) - I save the content in a special "toread" folder that is synced with syncthing - From my phone I can open all files in pretty much any epub app - With a few scripts I can search in them
Anyone else have a favorite alternative?
"What began as a read-it-later app evolved into something much bigger. After Mozilla acquired Pocket in 2017, we invested in building our content curation and recommendation capabilities so people everywhere can discover and access high quality web content. While Pocket is shutting down, we will continue to invest in this promise—through the New Tab experience, our email newsletter, and more."
One thing that stood out to me in the article was this this to justify the shutdown
> 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.
I'd be really interested to hear what exactly they mean by this, are people visiting fewer websites? Walled gardens like facebook etc make it useless for bookmarking so I can see how pocket would be a bad fit there
Self-Host Omnivore: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/blob/main/self-host...
Use this proxy to point to the Self-Hosted instance to pull from Omnivore Instead. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter
This is what I've been doing for a year or so now. I hope they don't remove the Kobo integration code from my Kobo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41985118
Apparently the community is trying to shape the project into a workable self-hosted state. Ironic post from two months ago about a user trying to migrate away from Pocket to Omnivore:
https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/4550
Same community users provide crowdsourced list of open source alternatives to Omnivore:
Demo without signup. Upon signup the service is free. Not mining your data either.
Just running a hosted version of the excellent and open source (both server and client) Omnivore would be an amazing service to the open web and for data archiving/portability, but I'm not holding my breath.
https://mastodon.social/@kepano/114553164915046938
You can use Web Clipper with any app that supports Markdown, not just Obsidian.
Defuddle is the underlying HTML-to-Markdown library I made for Web Clipper, and can also be used as a CLI:
The thing I really want is this, combined with some automated local background LLM training / rag (not sure what the right approach is) process. So that, at the end of the day, everything I bookmark get saved locally, can be read in a nice format like you have the video, and be semantically queried, and it's all local:
"What was that article I saw read 1-3 months ago some new type of LLM training?"
"Find that really nice explanation of determinants article"
etc...
Have you investigated anything like that?
There's also Obsidian Web Clipper's Interpreter feature, which lets you run prompts on a web page before saving:
I do have a bug report: even when explicitly specifying which vault to send clippings to, what I experience is that it sends to my last opened one. On Android w Firefox Nightly and the extension.
Now I'm forced to find something similar, and I found Save-to-Read which does mostly what I need, although it feels a bit jankier.
I understand why people have hated this app for a very long time and blamed Mozilla for investing into it, but to me it has always had value by doing what tools were meant to do, make my life easier, even if that's just about saving a few clicks every time I wanted to save a page or dismiss it.
Let me get this straight: Baker's salary went from $2.4M in 2018 to nearly $7M in 2022, while browser share collapsed to 3.45%. During that time she laid off 320 employees (70 in Jan 2020, 250 in Aug 2020), claiming COVID despite record revenues in 2019. Then she steps down as CEO to "focus on AI," only to quit Mozilla entirely a year later.
Now the new CEO's brilliant strategy is to kill off Pocket - one of the few products people actually used that they acquired in 2017. Eight years of "investment" down the drain.
This is exactly what I mean when I say Mozilla has no fucking clue what they're doing. They're completely dependent on Google's search money, executives are getting rich while laying off workers, and their response to irrelevance is to shut down working products. The whole organization feels like it exists just so Google can point to it and say "we're not a monopoly."
Also, there's an official Linkwarden mobile app in development, aiming to support most (if not all) of Pocket's key features :)
I keep these links in a separate org-mode file, but honestly a spreadsheet or even a text file would be fine for that too.
Why does everything have to be complicated?
[0] https://getpocket.com/export
[1] https://github.com/karlicoss/pockexport?tab=readme-ov-file#s...
[2] https://github.com/karlicoss/pockexport/blob/master/example-...
Do I have any other similar options?
I'm thinking about throwing Claude Code at this problem and building a proper exporter that actually saves the content.
I wrote this Deno script to convert the CSV export to a Netscape Bookmark File Format-compatible HTML-file so that it can be imported to Linkding. Hope it's useful for someone else too! https://github.com/enjikaka/pocket-to-bookmark
Wasn't Pocket always trying to resist bad web trends? If I recall, they had a tool that would clean up webpages and remove all the junk so you can just focus on the article contents. And they were also trying to save the concept of bookmarking from complete irrelevance. I guess it's understandable that users didn't care, it was an uphill battle for non-power users, and power uses didn't like the sponsored articles and already had their bookmarks saved outside of Pocket.
I've been using Pocket for I don't know how long. I use it every day during my commute to read articles from everywhere. I was planning on using it on my 3-week multi-country summer vacation this August to occupy me during all the country hopping I was about to do.
This is a Google Reader killing type event for me.
I'm going to go self-hosted next. I'm sick and tired of this crap.
If Mozilla spent the engineering hours wasted on this toward fixing the ever growing mountain of existing bugs they might have more than 1% market share.
I am dismayed by how much money Mozilla spends on things other than the browser, though.
But in all seriousness I’ve got about 1000 articles I need to store and browse…somewhere when Pocket EoLs
This follows the long history of projects like Google+ and hopefully others like Facebook Watch will follow soon.
Obsidian doesn’t have all the features necessary for a read-it-later app, but almost!
What's nice about Pocket is that I can do this from any browser on any device, since it has integrations and an app for mobile devices. Trying to do this with a note taking app is much more clunky and frictional. Especially when trying to quickly find an article I had saved.
Anyway, if anyone knows something that fits this use case better, it looks like I'm in the market for it now
Browser integrations, tags and search works fine, but the notes functionality (“Description”) is very limited.
What’s going on for the market not to stably fill this gap? Is there no workable price point?
I can’t help but picture the Distracted Boyfriend meme, "reading my saved articles" vs "discovering new cool articles online to add to the ever-growing Pocket backlog, never to be read."
>Focusing on what powers better browsing We acquired Fakespot in 2023 to help people navigate unreliable product reviews using AI and privacy-first tech. While the idea resonated, it didn’t fit a model we could sustain.
Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved,
Did Fakespot own pocket? I still use fakespot as an additional marker in my research of purchases.
Still a FF fanboi, but fully behind shutting anything down that detracts from core FF.
Maybe old school, but would much prefer a focus on a browser focused on privecy.
Why isn’t there a simple bookmarking solution that can survive technology shifts?
The main advantage is that content recommendations based on previously saved content are pretty good, especially for tech oriented crowd.
AI tagging feature like those in Pocket and Karakeep, in the first place, seems helpful. But months later, you will get lots of tags to handle. Content recommendation, especially if that only consider what we saved, can replace the tagging things I guess. I wonder how do you do this for free, though.
Also your HN/Reddit integration is what I'm looking for. The way I save things from HN so far in Karakeep is that I save the main article and add the HN url manually to the note.
Seems like a big win for Instapaper, who will likely pick up a lot of Pocket's abandoned users.
It was also a great way to read paywalled articles for free.
I'm sorry, but lmao.
Mozilla just cannot get out of their own way. All we want is a good open fucking browser not dominated by a corporation, and they can't stop distracting themselves with things that don't matter and then eventually shutting them down.
Mozilla needs to clean house of their leadership. Burn it all down. Start from scratch. It's a joke right now...and I say that as a daily user of Firefox and someone that desperately wants them to succeed.
SOMEONE needs to be held accountable for failures like this...but all we will get is vague half apologies and corporate bullshit.
The comments lead me to believe it was an extension or application for saving web pages in a more readable form for a personal archive type thing.
However the obituary mentions curation and an editorial team.
Did they select the info for you or it was your own choice?
Also, it's not just Pocket, it's also Fakespot, which I didn't even know existed.
Fuck you, Mozilla.
pavel_lishin•6h ago
dylan604•5h ago
amlib•5h ago
I've always wished a browser such Firefox would extend bookmarks as an offline archive of all links you add to it. Your own personal wayback machine perhaps.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/view-page-archive/