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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250321050043/https://getpocket...
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
Never trust a company like this. You'll always get burned. If it's not FOSS, its not reliable and will likely burn you
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)
Also?
An organization's past doesn't dictate their present.
I know there are services that offer more, but if I look at how I __actually__ used them, this does the trick.
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.
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
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!
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 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 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.
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.
Also, linkding offers a way to read it later by using the singlefilextension https://linkding.link/archiving/
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.
Get it from your repository. In that case you are trusting somebody like Debian or Redhat. They’ve earned an awful lot of trust.
people who can decide if somebody else's code is "good enough" to host it themselves
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...
Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.
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 :)
Here is what the raw csv look like if you check my tool example: https://doublememory.com/posts/tools/pocket/
The text that’s separated by pipe are the tags.
(Now I read it, it does sound like so. My bad.)
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 own the hardware you purchased? Even before the ongoing craze to turn fridges into subscriptions into landfill. Try some "retro" devices from 15, 20, 30y ago - many builtin websites/apps/services just 404, long before companies planned for obsolescence.
Only diamonds are forever.
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.
Edit: and I see now other folks noticed and shared it as well.
I think of Wallabag and Readeck as readers since they render the page in “app” , keep track of your reading progress, and in some cases let you highlight text
I'm of course happy to take it down if you do mind, just let me know. And thank you again!