Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

Wow, after Instapaper went back to indie from Pinterest[1] and Omnivore closing last year this is no longer surprising. This is also proof that read-it-later app as a category is not sustainable as a venture / company backed service.

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.

^[1]: https://blog.instapaper.com/post/175953870856

I actually don't necessarily think that's true - As someone that has a bit of a background with the codebase of Omnivore I think the thing that killed that wasn't necessarily the business model (let's be real, they didn't even offer a premium tier.)

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.

You are right. The architecture is just creating burdens and frictions to sustain the business if mostly relies on freemium user expansion. This is especially attractive to VC backed companies as they sometimes are judged by their growth when they are pre-revenue. And growth with free users is like a poisonous apple, that looks appealing but only accelerate the burning of your cash pile. To the point that it's afraid of charge money that may impact their main growth metrics.

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.

Apple also has a read later service built into Safari. It’s not the most feature rich, but it has existed for several years now.

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 have a read later “service” called keeping a couple hundred tabs open at once (enabled with Sidebury vertical tabs and their panels). Works great for me.

I have 134 tabs open on my phone right now. Every few months I get fed up enough and close them all, or maybe all but 3.

This looks like a lovely body of work.

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!

>> Apple also has a read later service built into Safari. It’s not the most feature rich, but it has existed for several years now.

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).

That's how it inspired me to create this app really. I often do this to important text subconsciously so one day I asked what if i can automatically save that... It feels intuitive and avoids the extensions.

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!

That's indeed the bane of this category of apps. You save it but don't ever go back. Yet we all intuitively want to use it as we can never allocate the right mental space at the right time. Our brain usually are in the browsing mode when we are on social, and needs a slightly different mindset when we are ready to dive into a long read.

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.

> This is also a category of app that I believe could be better served by local-first native apps.

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

The thing I don’t like about Apple’s implementation is the All list doesn’t show read/unread status. There is a list for unread, but not for read.

I just pulled mine up to go through it and if I had to guess I have about 5 read out of probably 250. Which 5 those are, no idea. I also find it very easy to accidentally click on an item, which marks it as read without any visual indication. I just have to know this, and then remember to right-click and mark unread.

I spent a little time this afternoon (maybe 10 minutes) looking at export options to get the data in a way I can go through it. It seems to be stored in a plist along with the bookmarks. plutil has an export option, but it won’t export to json (it throws an error), so I’m left with 150k lines of XML, which then converted to 31k lines of json. I’m now debating if I should continue down this road, or just plow through it in Safari. There are some things on GitHub, but I don’t want to run them without reviewing the code, and at that point, I’d rather write my own. Maybe I’ll use it an excuse to try out duckdb.

Just added a Pocket Importer for those who are interested in giving DoubleMemory a try: https://doublememory.com/posts/tools/

You can also import from ReadWise, Omnivore or any other format via our custom GPT importer...

It's actually all saved in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist as bookmarks. You can drop that into https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6811b049cbdc8191b91c6ed291a88e4f-dou... which is a custom GPT I created for DoubleMemory. And see if it works. I do have plans to automate this in the future, right now still trying to collect feature requests confirmation tho.

I loved using Omnivore, and I've found so far in building https://curi.ooo that you can actually do a lot of the legwork in rendering webpages client-side (even on mobile) so that the server-side processing is just used to simplify the HTML. Obviously I'm nowhere near Omnivore's scale but so far costs have been extremely manageable.

I appreciate it, but I don't like the idea of uploading my whole bookmark file. I ended up vibe coding something with ChatGPT. It also asked to upload it, but I vetoed that and made it work. Since it is a well known file, it had data to work with.

Turns out all my exports were a waste of time, as it made it overly complicated and hard to parse, so it took the plist, extracted the reading list, pulled out the values I wanted (extracted the domain to give me that, because siteName was missing on almost everything), and gave me some clean json and a csv.

It turns out I had over 450 items in there. I thought it was going to be half that. I would never have gotten through that in Safari. Hopefully this will make it easier to scan through and dismiss most of these, and maybe highlight the couple I might still want. I have articles dating back to 2016... yikes.

Your app looks great, I love when apps make good use of iCloud syncing.

If you don't mind me asking, what's your plan for monetization? I'm considering moving over from Raindrop.io, but am a bit worried about basic features ending up behind a subscription.

My plan is to keep everything free and work on value generating features that will focus on organization and consumption. Think of it this way, most features we have so far are just making it easy to capture, which is just step one. The users are giving us a chance to keep their content. We don’t really generate any value until they later search it or consume it. I’m hoping to align to that value.

Practically speaking, I’m planning to keep existing features free with no limits. I’ll be working on these truly value generating features with a bit more limits at a fair price so it can sustain the development.

> You save it but don't ever go back.

I have a thing which picks 10 random unread "old-ish" links from Pocket (via my local DB) and emails them to me. (Used to be an iOS Shortcut but Pocket's API got in the way and I turned it into Go on my server instead.) Quite handy for surfacing things you've forgotten about but the linkrot in older saves means it's sadly often useless.

Cool. I'm actually planning to add shortcuts to DM as well. I'm not a heavy user but am becoming a fan...