Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

I have another theory, actually.

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.

What's your other theory? ;-)

+1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)

Agree on search being abysmal - I'm surprised that none of these readings apps realized that the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet.

perch.app is the newest entrant to this space, and it's the closest I've seen to getting this right.

Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared).

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.

Best alt other than perch? For whatever reason I can’t get it to show up in the share/send menu on iOS and doesn’t seem to have a browser extension.

How do you send articles to it?

Maybe https://pinboard.in? I haven't used it, but it tempts me a few times per decade.

What was the theory!!! I had to read your comment twice looking for it, only to realize that there was no theory in there!

I recently started using wallabag. Seems to do the job decently

> having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk

the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy!

I think it's more easily explained by incompetence. Esp. when stop words like 'of' and 'the' are somehow included in the index. These are almost trivial to remove prior to indexing (any decent indexing library, such as lucene, would have a prepared list of stop words filter, and it's not like you even need to do any work to have it!).

I used to use Rain.drop, not the same a pocket, but similar. I imported the data into Obsidian and I now use that for information I want to save online using the clipper plugin. It's changed my life. If you like customizing the searchability and displaying content from saved pages, is the best IMHO.

Is something like Apache Solr (a search index) well suited for something like this?

I've deployed and used it at work for searching specific, well-specified bits of information, but I don't know how well it would work on large chunks of text like articles etc; I assume this is its real purpose and it should fit, but I'm guessing.

I think it was that people stopped using Pocket because the search was so bad.

Rain.drop is Russian, isn't it?

Just pgsql is enough. Even a chache db or sqlite do full text search

it's very good because it's simple and hasn't changed in over 10 years. you know it won't change, and it's the best $6.28 I've ever invested (but of course, I wouldn't pay for it every year; I would find another solution).

The maintainer of Raindrop is from Kazakhstan

> the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy!

Sure it should be but reality says Google has many more and probably better lawyers so the risk is clearly different.

I’m curious: with that many saves, what were you main reasons for using Pocket? Did you glean info at scale or is it just the case that you saved so much, read some subset, and it grew over time?

The initial idea was nice: do not lose what you want to read later (the list), keep a list of what you read (archive). Then it became better with “Permanent copies”: never lose content you want to read again later.

That number is a combination of all three, plus more than a decade of active use.

IMO search is garbage in all Mozilla products.

E.g. Thunderbird ignores potential matches in quoted mail text. That's utterly useless if one remembers a certain mentioning by the other side. Plus, now and then repairing the index suddenly leads to matches -- when is the right time to repair? I don't now -> always if it's seriously important...

Damn, any alternatives in mind for that workflow?

My killer feature that led me to start using Pocket was Kobo integration: I could hit a button on my computer and continue reading an article on my ereader, duly cleaned up.

I'm not familiar with the various search features of different databases.

Do they offer things like the phonetic search that Solr does?

With Solr you can search a noun for example even if you only know how to say it and not how to spell it.

I'm glad people are mentioning Wallabag. It's open source and self-hostable, so it's not as likely to disappear on you. If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...

I've run Wallabag before but stopped around the time my son was born so I'd have more time to take care of him. And... I switched to Pocket. Oh well! I guess I'll switch back now, probably for good.

Thunderbird search is bad enough that I just open up the Gmail website to find an email. At this point I don't even know why I use a local email client, except maybe 25 years of muscle memory.

See, now "local repository search" is one of those things that you would think that somebody would use one of the LLMs for.

Alas, that would be "useful" but not Unicorn Lottery Ticket Useful and so will never get implemented.

Since I'm slowly moving to self-hosting, I'll be installing Wallabag[0] most probably.

I also integrated my Kobo with Pocket with glee, but it turned into gloom when my saves ate all of the free memory of the reader :)

[0]: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

> the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet.

This is not the right solution for me. Pocket was the perfect one, even in the first iteration. I don't want discovery. I want a personal box/shelf which keeps a list of what I want to read and what I have read. Permanent copies was a great add-on while it lasted too. Because I want the version I have seen. Not the edited/updated one.

Perch doesn't work the way I want. In fact, it's the direct opposite of what I need.

Looks like neat workflow. I use Obsidian too, but not in that way. I don't want a collage of what I have read, I want a database which I can dig, like Pocket.

Looks like my future lies in a self-hosted Wallabag instance.

I kindly disagree. Yes, Thunderbird's search is not revolutionary, but when I direct it to a box containing ~20 years of e-mails, it returns instantly, searching for the words that I want.

...and I'm not even downloading the e-mails to the system to save disk space. I have explicitly disabled that.

> suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this

I think Mozilla specialises in this. At some point, having many tabs open on the Firefox iOS app would eat all the memory and lag out the phone. This problem even came and went a couple of times over the years.

It’s an unloved child being held captive for the money it earns.