As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?
Before pocket I was using instapaper, seems like it’s still around. Bit of a shame about pocket, it’s pretty useful
From the 404media article on the subject:
The Distilled announcement post says the company made the choice to shut down these products because “it’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.” It also says the choice will allow Mozilla to “shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.” Which is what everyone wants: more AI bloat in their browsers.
(The monkey paw turns, and) we got our wish.
We did, internet! We killed Pocket!
Owning things like Pocket is fine as long as each product stands on it’s own. Melding them together is what upsets their user base.
100%. And companies don’t seem to realize this. I’ll use fakespot, but there is absolutely no use for it to be an inbrowser app, and the fact that it suggests (pushes) the idea each time I use the website is just maddening. That said, I appreciate that service.
Pocket can stay or leave. I don’t care one way or the other. I never understood its usecase.
Everything good to halfway decent must die on the alter of cost cuts, but nevermind and never notice that they’re investing all of the savings on dubious junk like AI.
i literally JUST installed fakespot lol
I wanted to like pocket, but I never really understood the point of it when I was already using Reddit or Google News to curate what I liked to read about. Was it more privacy oriented?
I found that articles in pocket were actually well written and didn’t make you pull your hairs out
I hated it at first but then I started to leave pocket on and click links every now and then since I figured they got revenue out of it. I don’t use it often but its a shame to see it go now that I kind of like it.
Wait, I didn’t know Mozilla actually owned Pocket, I thought they just had a partnership or something…
I used to main Pocket back in the days when I had an iPod Touch 4G and older iPhone models, nowadays… It is storing articles from those days that I bet I haven’t gotten to read 😂
Man, one gets a backlog of everything these days.
Welp, guess I better start up the calibre extension to send pocket articles as a file for ebook readers.
I use Pocket since before Mozilla bought it. In combination with my kobo ereader, it changed the way I read the Internet for the better. Self hosting is no option for me and as far as I know Pocket was the best free read-it-later service. And the only one that worked seamless with Kobo. I really hope Rakuten buys it.
The fuck is a “read it later” service? Bookmarks?
It’s significantly more accessible than trying to sync bookmarks with an Ereader’s shitty browser
Can you pull up a bookmarked item to read when you don’t have an active network connection? If yes, that’s a “read it later” service. If no, then that’s why they are useful.
So saving a page.
Oh, you are missing so much…
I really hope Rakuten buys it.
why do you think they won’t enshittify it? they own viber, see what they did there. ads all over the app, some in channels you can’t disable. once it asked me about the data collection I allow, I had to manually disable it with dozens of toggles for all their “business partners”, and it took at least half an hour.
I don’t know what viber is. I also don’t think they won’t enshittify it. I just hope to buy more time until a similar service or technology appears.
Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.
This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.
I used to use it before it got acquired by Firefox to store my read it later list.
I wanted to like pocket but the articles were such useless slop crap. I feel bad for writers who actually have a passion for the craft but end up sitting down and shitting out low quality popsci articles all day.
bUt iT’S jUSt bOoKmARkS
- people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
it’s a shame to see it go, it’s been the first read-it-later service that I was aware of and used. I’ve moved away to Omnivore (RIP) and then Wallabag (https://wallabag.it/ for 11€/year, but you can self-host it or find someone else to host it for you for a lower fee), but I’ve still been thinking fondly of it, despite Mozilla clearly trying to force people into social reading rather than just serve as a convenient offline storage of articles.
Why would you need a saas solution if it’s for offline reading? Seems like a contradiction
…so that you can read it on a device other than the one you’ve initially opened the link on? I can save a link to Wallabag from my laptop’s browser at home, have my e-readet sync it, and then read it offline while on a train.
what OS does your ereader run? can it run syncthing? can it open HTML?
it’s a jailbroken Paperwhite, so I could look into setting up a Syncthing KOReader plugin, but my current setup works perfectly fine for me.
oh, I realized you have been using wallabag nowadays. but syncthing, plus pages saved with the singlefile or the webscrapbook addon could work fine
Pocket always saved the page as both the regular website and a converted article view.
I hear you. I discovered Omnivore and was in the process of migrating from Pocket to it until less than a year later Omnivore was gone.
I have ended up using Zotero for this, which takes a snapshot of the webpage for offline reading (and preservation). Synced to other clients through my WebDAV server. Originally only used Zotero as a reference manager for academic journal papers, but liked using it more broadly.
Obsidian with the readitlater plugin is good, and actually stored in a standard format entirely on your devices, so truly offline.
I’ve heard good things about karakeep (also requires self hosting) https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
How does all this compare with something like Goodlinks?
well, for starters I can’t install Goodlinks on Linux, Android, or a jailbroken Kindle.
Gotcha
Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn’t the only one doing that… I’m sure it had its users but I always found normal bookmarks to be more convenient.
Never even heard of Fakespot, though.
Bookmarks and services like Pocket are for different things. Bookmarks are for websites you come back to often. Pocket and other services like it are for saving links to stuff you want to remember and/or come back to once or a few times. Bookmarks are not made for having thousands of, while “read later” services are for saving anything and easily have hundreds, thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of things saved.
Fakespot was kinda nice, whenever I looked at something on amazon I’d get a sidebar showing which reviews are real and summarizing them. It’s actually pretty useful. Definitely will not miss Pocket.
Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.
The best method I’ve had is to ignore any off brand looking product that’s been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.
Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it’s for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.
Is camel camel camel still useful for Amazon?
Keepa is better, and depending on whether you’re conspiratorial, not compromised as 3Camels was accused of some years ago.
Compromised?
I’ve found it useful enough not too long ago, mostly for comparing Amazon’s pricing differences for identical products between various EU countries.
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
Never heard of this. Sounds useful, except I’m really only buying something from them because I need it quickly most of the time. I don’t have the convenience of waiting for price drops like I do with Steam games haha. Thanks for sharing!
didn’t fakespot only work in the USA?
Never tried it outside of the USA, couldn’t tell ya.
Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.
Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.
I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.
OMG I JUST started using Pocket because my work banned Firefox and made us all switch to Edge!!
Now how am I going to sync bookmarks and pages I want to read later on my personal devices??
There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.
I generate a QR code and scan it with my phone. Don’t sync work and personal devices.
I’d be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn’t require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..
Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.
If your work doesn’t care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
Yeah, me too. I hate that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar. It’s the first thing I disable on every Firefox installation.
Glad it’s gone for good.
This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs
T o I h f n e t t e F h r u e n t e u t r eNice. How long did it take you to write this comment? Whenever I attempt stuff like this, it takes far longer than expected because I overcomplicate things
The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.
