I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.
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.
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.
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.
Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.
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.
I'm curious what the governance structure of Mozilla is that keeps things this way. People have been upset for quite a while at the direction Mozilla is going in, yet there seems to be no coalition to oust the current leadership. Is this impossible for some reason?
My hopes are with Servo, I like the novelty of it being implemented in Rust rather than C/C++.
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.
I’m not super familiar with Servo; I’d heard of the Mozilla layoffs but hadn’t followed the work. I believe I can now split my hopes between the Ladybird and Servo; thank you!
It is the MZLA Technologies Corporation a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation a wholly owned part of the Mozilla Foundation.
Yes. Mozilla was originally only the non profit, but it was ruled that selling the search rights violated nonprofit status. So they paid a couple million in back taxes and had to spin off a corporate entity that's fully owned by the nonprofit.
> A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.
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 doesn't, but the sentence referred to wasn't really aimed at them. I mean, Mozilla could ditch its engine and adopt chromium in order to really focus on advertising, and then it would also support said features from an end users perspective! Somehow I have a feeling that won't earn Mozilla praise.
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.
> When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company
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
The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge.
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.
I really really wish they would have gone with webkit, even though they could have with some effort used gecko. Just giving up and going blink engine is awful for diversity in browser engines. I don't have much hope for efforts like ladybird, as they're just too small and browsers are a huge ecosystem now.
Microsoft was (and is) interested in Electron. They used it for lots of stuff like MS Teams (which is now using their WebView2 control), VSCode, Outlook, and their Graph toolkit.
I don't think people even think about downloading browsers, swear the overwhelming majority of my irl friends only uses the default one on whatever phone, with rare exceptions.
>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.
Microsoft's goal was to make sure the browser didn't obviate Windows.
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.
Kagi is starting to build their Orion browser which is WebKit-based for Linux as of this year.
I never do anything close enough to the browser engine to know, but apparently devs like WebKit a lot?
Sure, but fewer (sic) features is mostly a better state of affairs, and apple devices are mostly what matter if you're catering to rich westerners (as most products on this forum try to do).
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.
Unfortunately, Safari is also pivoting towards ads in the form of “Help Apple to…”, services and that thing AI companies now call Personal Context. It’s not a bad browser just you wouldn’t pick it for privacy.
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.
I also used them before rebranding or even being acquired by Mozilla. I saved some bookmarks then they locked me out because they switched to a paid model. I deleted that app then. Very shortly after i heard they were acquired.
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)
I loved Pocket. I used it nearly daily. I was often in their top n% of users. I paid for it. Then one day they changed the way their rendering worked on iOS. And it destroyed my workflow.
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 bought an Amazon Fire tablet exclusively for Pocket use as well.
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%.
I'm in a similar spot: whenever I browse an article that could be better suited for the Kobo (i.e. admiral cloudberg), I send it to pocket. Right now I don't know how to replace it, because AFAIK Kobo don't allow to install anything similar.
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 don't think anyone was opposed to Pocket-the-product, but its integration into Firefox.
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.
I've also used it for several years, but it really was never great compared to anything else in this space and seemingly stopped any feature development years ago.
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.
My feelings are 30% annoyed (because I still have some data in there), 70% hopeful that a thoroughly mediocre contender is going a way and some more consolidation in this market might finally create critical mass for and focus on some open-source, data-exportable solution in the way Omnivore unfortunately couldn't.
Wallabag looks great, if a little homebrew. I signed up and had to laugh that the default "Welcome to wallabag" article could not be retrieved. Regardless, I decided to give 'em 12 bucks and see how it goes.
Just to add that you can also self-host it, and it supports Kobo as well. I once stumbled upon but didn't investigate further since Pocket just worked so well. I guess now I will have to.
I'm with you, I use Pocket all the time on my Kobo as well - I need to cobble together some self-hosted alternative. Did you find another alternative besides Omnivore?
I still use the self-hosted version of Omnivore - I had built quite a lot around it so when that shut down I just decided to transfer over.
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.)
One thing that unfortunately never got properly announced, is that over time Pocket was slowly open sourced piece-by-piece, mostly as it got rewritten/modernised, as I understand it: https://github.com/Pocket/
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.)
Kind of a bit "too little too late" when they're still open-sourcing it but by bit in 2025 after promising to open-source it during the acquisition in 2017. I'm not very impressed.
It wasn't started in 2025, it's a process that's been going on for years. (Presumably, but I don't actually have more information here, the pre-acquisition codebase couldn't easily be open sourced without rewriting for legal reasons, e.g. copyright residing with someone else.)
Nothing about the communication at the time indicated that publishing the source code would happen gradually over a decade. For all intents and purposes, what was promised was that it would be open source within some reasonably short time frame.
> 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 not contain tags or highlights.
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.
You can connect Pocket to Readwise Reader ( readwise.io/reader ), via Pocket's API, which will let Reader view all the tags, metadata, highlights, etc.
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)
No, unfortunately their API doesn't return the actual html content of the saved articles :( just the urls and all the metadata: highlights, title, author, image, tags, location, etc
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.
Love your app. Any plans to enable reading of Readwise Reader articles on eReaders like Kobo? I’m thinking of something akin to how Pocket’s integration with Kobo.
Thanks! Kobo is hard because it's proprietary software, but we would like 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 :)
seems to work better with https://fabiensanglard.net/rss.xml than most readers although it still gets 403s fetching images but I'll still give it a run to see how it works for me.
Cool! The import should auto-retry, but in case something gets snagged there you can also always do `cmd+k -> pocket` to retrigger a full import.
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!
Not to mention they charged $45 a year for a service that included backups in their cloud should your save become a dead link. Imagine paying that amount for several years and when you need it they pull the rug.
Yeah this is really lame. I used it because I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands.
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.
Mozilla's track record of shutting down projects is almost as bad as Google's. I wouldn't count on any of their non-Firefox projects lasting very long.
> I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction
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
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.
The page was "Last updated: 24 minutes ago". Someone at Mozilla saw this HN post and modified it (unsure if the export feature itself was changed or not).
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".
I migrated to raindrop.io[1] few months back and IIRC the file downloaded from Pocket did have tags. I again tried following the same steps and the CSV does have tags so I'm not sure why they save the export will not have tags?
I've tried all of the options: Linkwarden, Linkding, Karakeep, Shiori, Wallabag, Grimoire—you name it, I've tried it. These are all great tools, and I use Karakeep myself, but I use it to bookmark and archive links, not as a "read it later" tool.
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.
There is readeck, linkwarden and karakeep. Each has a slight different focus (readeck probably has the most read it later focus). There is also omnivore, but I have been struggling to get it to work selhosting (there currently is a bug that prevents signing in), it is also quite resource heavy.
Oh man. I have been working on a side project just for this purpose. The aim is to create a pocket like experience (with additional functionality like handling other media types) that is local first, unhosted, and more future-proof (no lock in).
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.
This might come off as dismissive, but after using services like Delicious from way back, I've more or less ended up using Obsidian to edit a few markdown files that contain links to stuff I liked.
I know there are services that offer more, but if I look at how I __actually__ used them, this does the trick.
I never used Pocket but was a long time user of Instapaper before moving to Readwise Reader. My experience has been that many links, other than the most recent ones, are dead.
> 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.
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.
It's a pity Sandstorm never super took off. Portable serverless with really nice security built in meant really easy to deploy apps; app server just for you or for a group of people was so nice & easy.
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.
I'm self-hosting a couple of services that stopped receiving updates (including security updates) about 10 years ago. They still serve my needs perfectly well. They're hidden behind HTTP authentication (with HTTPS) so the internet noise ("AI" shit, web scrapers, shodan, script kiddies) doesn't even know they exist.
What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.
> What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.
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).
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...
His point is about data portability, not service uptime.
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.
Chasing the ever-cycling list of organizations that haven't yet betrayed trust with regards to privacy. If you're going to go with the "who can you trust" angle then you need to qualify that with a type of product.
Also?
An organization's past doesn't dictate their present.
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 have been paying for readwise for about a year and a half now. I was a pocket subscriber for years before they got bought out by Firefox. All that said, I wouldn't call myself an advanced user of either (tag a lot less than I would like, want to revisit more than I do, etc.).
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.
That is definitely one of the biggest painpoints, and we feel it ourselves for whatever it's worth!
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!
I pay for Readwise Reader and it's pretty great, although I have been noticing issues extracting the full text on certain sites. It sometimes just seems to give up and the extract contains an empty block and is 1/10 of the expected length. A bit frustrating since that's my main use case.
I tried Matter but it lacked Android support at the time so didn't go deep into it. I've been a heavy Readwise user for the last two years or so. It's better than Pocket in almost every way, although as I've moved into the 99.9th percentile of archive size I'm seeing some annoying perf issues they'll hopefully fix. At least they have a Discord and are making actual updates to the app, something that Pocket stopped doing probably five years ago.
I have been using Obsidian Web Clipper to save stuff to read later. If you already use Obsidian it's worth a shot. It's not perfect but it does a reasonable job of translating articles etc. into markdown. I don't actually know if it saves images locally, I suspect not (which is probably a pretty big weakness)
I used Matter for a few weeks and it was fine. The email newsletter collection is interesting but it's sort of a paywalled feature and I didn't really use it much. Several other paywalled features I wasn't interested in. At the time I really wanted an iOS widget and I don't think Matter had one, so I bounced. I'm using Feedly now and really like it, especially for the suggested news RSS feeds. I get by with a free account and it feels like they don't try to convert you very often... Unfortunately the act of adding a new bookmark is weirdly slow on my phone. Maybe that's just my device.
> 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 think this is good, I'd like to see more side projects that don't directly relate to the core web browser shutdown in favour of browser performance, compliance and feature parity.
I really enjoyed https://waldenpond.press/ when it was up and running. They selected articles from your pocket once a month and then printed, bound, and mailed them to you. When I discovered the service I had a 500 hour reading backlog, and for $14/mo I was getting 100+ page books of self-curated content. They were perfect for flights, trips, and lending out. I was able to force it to include recipes as well, and I still find myself referencing them frequently.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but I built this YouTube/podcast to text free tool in case you want to try it and prefer reading instead of watching.
You would still have to read it in a digital screen but at least it is a black theme and a simple and clean UX/UI.
Seems like official export [0] has tags and annotations along with timestamps. However in case you'd like more structured full data from the API (instead of a mess with csv + json?), you can use my tool [1] to export it. Here's example of its output [2]
If you don't use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because they spent a bunch of money buying an unrelated company to add a feature you don't want. If you do use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because you don't want to be relying on a weird side project of a company because they'll do a terrible job of maintaining it and it'll inevitably get shut down.
Some people hated pocket, and would complain about it. Different people liked pocket and are commenting here.
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).
Nicely articulated.
I think their comment encapsulates the disbelief people have about public opinions that differ from their own political viewpoints (and the aspects that had been amplified within their own media/algorithmic bubble).
The complainers were FF users forced to deal with bloat they didn't use, those who are sad here are pocket users. They're just different people. Though, even those who didn't like the bundling of the extension probably didn't actively want the service to fail.
Right. I would be one of the people who saw pocket as an unnecessary distraction, but even I tested it and my opinion is partly based on pocket just not working in my Firefox at the time. I also just did not like that it was given space in the toolbar while a way more important rss button was denied that space. And despite that, I still think the shutdown now is bad - this should be spun out or be moved to a Foss project, and certainly not be killed for more ai nonsense.
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.
Pocket was pushed pretty heavily and basically shoved down the throat of Firefox users. Many obviously complained about this behaviour, either because they had no use for Pocket or already had a different solution. Mozilla was basically mimicking Microsoft behaviour of just forcing products/features onto it's users.
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'm quite happy about it. I might even print out a tombstone to piss on.
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.
I think it's consistent to be annoyed that they went and bought something and shoved it into everyone's browser, but also that they're taking away a service that people have come to depend on.
That's not true, I sing the praises of things that bring me value all the time. I am, arguably, getting pretty close to "shill" category for some of them. However, I think that behavior should get a pass if the things being shilled are actually FOSS and not just "change from one company to the other"
I think statistically I'm still right. Complaints are always more frequent than positive comments -- and more unsolicited. I always factor that in when reading, for example, product reviews. While there are always people willing to sing the praises of products they like, the average content person is likely to just move on with their lives, and a wronged person cannot wait to tell everyone.
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.
This is what confused me coming into this thread too! I was wondering what it'd be like consider how widely unpopular pocket is around here. Enough that anytime Firefox is brought up people point to pocket. No one defending it at those times so at just hear negatives. I'm sure there are plenty of different users but it's interesting to see what opinions dominate a thread at a given time.
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)_/¯
I built Obsidian Web Clipper (open source, MIT) to replace my read-it-later app and save everything to local markdown files. Now that Obsidian Bases is available, it makes for a very nice web archival tool and reading experience. Here's a video:
Thank you for your work on this! It's become my go-to since leaving Pocket.
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.
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"
I've been wanting a tool that does exactly one thing, keep the bookmarks of Firefox and Chrome synced on my local PC. I don't want collaboration, distributed, cloud first, SaaS, friends, notifications, tags, AI, or anything else. Any suggestions for a tool like that?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
>> 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).
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.
I have used Wallabag[0] for read-later articles for many years. Very happy about it. I host it on a VPS but they offer a paid instance[1] themselves for $9/y. And otherwise you can use something like Pikapods[2] which is also dirt cheap.
I would say I was sad to see it go, but I moved to karakeep (formerly known as Hoarder) a few months ago and it's been a perfect replacement. Most importantly, you can self-host it - which is great.
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
I started using Pocket in 2012 and have used it ever since (though I’ll obviously have to stop now). It was a great way to save interesting articles I didn’t have time to read right away. Naturally, I rarely got around to actually reading them, and the backlog kept growing. I just exported my data and found 13,000 unread articles out of a total of 34,000.
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."
This might be a more manual solution for Kobo imports, but I've taken to saving pages of interest via Joplin's web clipper extension. Pages can be saved as Markdown, HTML, screenshot, or URL. If I save the Markdown version (typically looks fine), it will have also saved linked images. Exporting that to another folder gives me something that I can convert to epub, using Pandoc. From there, it's trivial to copy over to my Kobo as before. Of course, this already would have been readable on my phone, since my notebooks also sync across devices.
I’ve been using Raindrop and have used the Permanent Copy (offline) feature enough that I wouldn’t consider doing without it. It’s worth every penny if you ask me. And you can host it yourself AFAIK, I just haven’t looked into it much.
It's not important what it is. Pocket was bought overpriced by Mozillas incompetent officers on a project to diversify their income by playing VC. They then decided to piss all over their Firefox browser users by forcefully integrating it with the browser. It was a terrible decision, a terrible business, and now way past its best by date its finally taken out to pasture. Sadly the incompetent officers continue their tenure and soon we'll write this obituary for Mozilla, as their C-level compensation inevitably outstrips what Google is willing to pay for a 1% market share and declining browser.
I was a paying Pocket customer until a few weeks ago. I switched to Wallabag plus https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako/ to sync to my Kobo. It's not polished, but honestly neither was Pocket with their decline in both article parsing and the iOS apps over the last few years.
Hopefully this situation encourages more contribution and improvement to tools like these.
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.
Was really considering using https://www.reademaillater.com/ to sync long newsletters (mainly Matt Levine, which isn't available free on the web but is via email) to my Kobo, and this sucks.
Yep, this got me hooked on pocket as well. I had/have so many articles on there that ar easy to read on a bus / train / plane or in bed before falling asleep.
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 should be able to change it with fairly minimal changes. I managed to modify some things to proxy articles from Omnivore to it, and the functionality remained largely the same across the two services.
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.
This is the primary way I read longer articles on the internet. I hope something else pops up because this changes my daily routine pretty significantly.
They should at least allow to download their copy of the saved articles, PDF or HTML or whatever format they save it in.
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 think doing this would expose how poorly they've actually saved their copies of articles. Pocket has always had a very funny definition of "permanent copy" which doesn't mean what you think it does! I'm a little saddened by their demise but the service has been so terrible for so long that I've long since moved to the much superior Readwise.
A little surprised to see the sadness regarding something that seemed to be universally scorned whenever it was brought up. I never tried it and don't really have an opinion, but why couldn't this functionality be created as an extension (possibly connecting to a 3rd party service? I don't know why that would be necessary. Can extensions throw stuff into firefox sync?)?
I used it to save things, and read it on multiple devices. The readability view was never my chief concern.
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 remember requesting the source code after they bought it[1]. They kept kicking the can down the road. It looks like they dumped everything in a monorepo on Github[2] which does nothing good for anyone.
Seems like Mozilla is dead-set on grinding up any good will they get from users.
Ugh, and that only months after Omnivore (a really great FOSS "read it later" app) shut down.
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?
Mozilla continues to appear to not get the philosophies behind open source. If they really wanted to help people and not simply try to get market share and make money, they'd examine ways to make Pocket itself open source, including the server end of things.
"We're handing this over to a non-profit" would be nice.
Upon reading this at first I was like "Oh, crap!", but then after a minute I realized that I wasn't bother to export my saved articles... it was basically digital hoarding, for me, I think. While I did use it, I likely won't miss it.
Saving links and offline reading is dime a dozen nowadays, but the one BIG feature was recommended articles, which basically opened the reading list of the world and you could read extremely interesting longform articles based on your list. It was the best magazine you could imagine. But I guess it required maintenance and moderation so they axed it - in the typical fashion of an acquired product I might say.
I still wish for something like this with privacy in mind and community maintained.
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.
Ah, I'm talking about feeding -into- Pocket. I haven't found anything except Instapaper that has direct IFTTT actions for saving URLs or anything which natively supports a webhook kind of thing for saving (but I'm sure there must be something because it seems such an obvious thing to support!)
True, there are a lot of bots that use Internet Archive, which is probably the easiest to scrape. Maybe ask Jason Scott of Archive Team if he has any ideas for how to use IA and other archives for this purpose, and for ideas about how else to get this data?
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.
Thank you for the link. I didn't realize Fakespot is also getting shut down. I guess these acquisitions didn't work out so well profit-wise, but it's good to see more focus on their core browser.
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.
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.
My specific need is I like to reference articles I've read later, quickly. I was using Pocket to track links to articles I've read, keeping them categorized with tags. It's been a mediocre solution for this need (e.g. I'd like to add more metadata, such as notes), but I haven't found too many apps/products that serve this use case.
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
>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.
Such a shame and wasted potential. Mozilla could have turned Pocket into a read it later + RSS reader killer combo that would have closed the browsing loop across the web on Firefox. But they slept on it, actively worsening it and finally putting it out of its misery. This is an end of an era and it has such a chime of finality to it.
Sort of peculiar that a company that is based on and makes open source software wouldn't wind down Pocket as a product but release it to the community. I don't have any particular wish to use it--I moved on years ago--but it's odd at a sort of ethical level that Mozilla, of all companies, would disappear software.
Another feature no one asked for, meeting its technological grave. For those few users of Pocket this function could have been easily handled as an extension.
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've used Pocket in combination with the In My Pocket add-on for a very long time on a daily basis. I don't particularly care about the online specific features, I don't care about syncing, or any of that. I've used Pocket specifically as a better and quicker Bookmarking tool than the browser's default to save pages I want to read later, simple as that and it worked flawlessly.
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.
The think I liked about pocket was the integration with my Kobo ebook reader.
I could browse the web on my phone or laptop and "add to pocket" for later, then could fire up my ereader and read the articles formatted nicely on my epaper screen.
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
> 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
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 wonder if they’d be willing to sell it to the right group of folks. I’d love to have a community owned read it later service. Otherwise, we’re all on a never ending treadmill from one service to the next.
did anyone ever offer a method of detecting link rot in bookmarks automagically? i gave up on using bookmarks a very long time ago after finding so many links no longer working.
Not automatically but when you open a dead link you can ease the pain by using an extension such as "page archive" [1] to quickly search an archive such as the wayback machine and perhaps get something useful out of it.
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.
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:
Pocket and other similar services always ended up becoming a virtual junk drawer for me, as I was just hoarding content to consume when I have free time, but time never realyl freed itself up and content just kept pilling in. In the end, it just became one of those annoying things that I have to disable on a new installation of Firefox.
I abandoned Pocket a while ago. I believe the offline mode was unreliable. Instapaper has been a really good replacement for me. My use case is to queue up articles to read on my iPad without distractions.
Dang, like many others I use Pocket extensively - especially with my Kobo e-reader. This is very sad!
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
Crap. My Kobo Libra supports Pocket as its only built-in way to get articles onto the device. I use GoodLinks to store links I like, and have a Shortcut that copies new articles from GoodLinks to Pocket. If I’m reading something interesting but long, I bookmark it, and that evening it’s on my ereader waiting for me.
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?
They were told it was a mistake to buy it, they didn't listen, like they never listen. I used to love the organization but it's so resistant to outside input that I had to leave the community about 12 years ago.
Same and it's my favourite Kobo feature. I hope Mozilla releases Pocket source code for people willing to self-host it. Kobos are highly hackable and I'm sure the community will find a way to change getpocket.com domain in the built-in Pocket app, even if Rakuten chooses not to provide this option.
I’ve been having trouble with Pocket’s offline mode and TTS feature for a while, and just migrated (yesterday!) to Obsidian via Obsidian Web Clipper (automated using Pupeteer).
Obsidian doesn’t have all the features necessary for a read-it-later app, but almost!
This really hurts. All my content consumption workflow depends on Pocket, I shortlist from my rss reader (inoreader) directly into pocket, then ot gets synced with readwise reader automatically where I listen to the chosen articles [1]. I also use my pocket account's archive as a collection of the articles and writings I have liked (planning to build a personal and simple content recommendation system for myself).
[1] https://saeedesmaili.com/posts/my-content-consumption-workfl...
Not sure yet. Since I'm already paying for readwise, I might use that, but then sharing from inoreader to readwise will be multiple steps instead of the current built in pocket integration I use. I should also make sure I'm keeping a local archive of read and unread stuff just in case.
I'll also contact inoreader to see if they will replace their built-in pocket integration with anything else.
I had submitted the Mozilla blog post about this and Fakespot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063930) but this submission seems to have received the traction. I added a comment to my submission pointing here.
I was a premium user of pocket for almost a decade before mozilla bought it and I remained a user for another few years after the acquisition. Mozilla turned it into garbage that didn't even do it's job properly and it is a bit sad to see it shut down.
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?
A bunch of alternatives were already mentioned. If you’re looking for an rss feed reader that can also save links directly, Lighthouse[1] may be an option.
I have been using Pocket + p2k for long articles that I prefer to read on Kindle. There are several issues with the setup, but this works well enough for most articles that I have sticked to it over the years. Looks like I have to find an alternative now.
One issue I've had with read-it-later apps is that I end up accumulating far too many articles and never actually reading them. Now my approach is simple: if I see something I want to read, I either read it immediately or never.
There could be a better system (for me): a read-it-later app with a strict limit—say, 3 or 5 slots. If it's full and you add a new article, the oldest one gets automatically deleted to make room. That way, you always have something to read, but never feel overwhelmed by an endless backlog.
For me, this is just browser tabs. Modern browsers seem to do a good enough job with both persisting tab state between sessions and not expending tons of resources on idle tabs. So I just pop the article of interest up in a new tab and leave it there until I get back to it.
Truth be told, my relationship with Pocket has dipped significantly over the years. According to my email, I signed up for Read It Later in March of 2011, which coincided with the release of their Android beta. It was the first thing I installed on every new browser or phone, and for many years, my end of the year recap had me at the top 1% of readers.
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.
Pocket was very convenient to send random articles to my Kobo, which comes with a Pocket integration. Great for reading long blog posts and such, easier on the eyes. Will miss it.
Huh, that’s annoying. Been using pocket since around 2008, mainly for when I was abroad and roaming was costly. Looks like I’ll need to export my library of stuff.
Well, crap. I've had a Pocket account for more than ten years. It's a key feature on my Kobo devices, to boot.
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 use KOReader [1] on my Kobo. It supports Wallabag [2]. Wallabag offers both hosted [3] and self-hosted options. There's also a standalone kobo client for Wallabag [4]. In addition, Wallabag also supports direct import from Pocket.
Pocket has pretty much exclusively been a, “send article to Kobo” button for me thanks to the integration.
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.
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.
I use it pretty extensively. Aside from being a pretty poor experience on mobile (it straight up can't be used on iOS at all, works ok on Android), it's the best web clipper I've used.
I really wish they would integrate the functionality into Obsidian itself, though I think there are technical limitations with it.
Is there anything (preferabbly local-first, and sync with dropbox or any other service) that simply snips the article (preferably using simlar tech as "reader mode"), and something that supports other media? (youtube videos, instagram reels, etc)
Can someone suggest a good bookmarking app that can be used offline, as well as great typography and neat bookmarking of social media videos? Absolutely. At least embed and show it correctly.
I've never used Pocket, so I can't comment on feature parity, but for people looking for an alternative I've been using Instapaper for years and have been very happy with it. The founders recently bought it back from Pinterest and have been making steady improvements.
So much wasted potential, I was a top 1% reader for a couple years (mostly because I saved a lot of things probably); it was a convenient way to save articles and references in multiple devices but at the end I was frustated it was so cumberstone to keep links organized.
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.
A read-it-later app. Pocket, you had one job. Just one job. And for a while that was my killer app on mobile. But, as we see, the enshitification of the web continues.
"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."
So Mozilla is shutting down Pocket completely by July, and this is under their new CEO Laura Chambers who took over in February 2024. Meanwhile Mitchell Baker - who was pulling in $6.9M by 2022 - just bailed out entirely this February after "focusing on AI and internet safety" for exactly one year.
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."
Pocket was always completely incompatible with Mozilla/Firefox, and is at this point hopelessly outdated compared to all competitors. I really don't understand what they were thinking.
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.
So disappointed. I had such high hopes when Mozilla acquired them, specifically for the integration with Firefox.
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.
Another day, yet another service that I used shut down. It does make one want to get better at programming and build one's own solutions since these multi-million and billion dollar companies are more concerned with shareholder value than their users.
The writing was on the wall for Pocket when paywalls started to go up everywhere a few years ago. By that point, it could no longer scrape articles reliably.
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.
I've got years of saved articles in there and the export situation is pretty bad. It only gives you the URLs, not the actual content. So if a site goes down (which happens all the time), you're basically screwed.
I'm thinking about throwing Claude Code at this problem and building a proper exporter that actually saves the content.
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.
They are also shuttering Fakespot which they acquired for an untold amount of money in 2023. Sounds like this little attempt at being "AI guardrails" is over.
~90% of HN commenters who mentioned Pocket in the last decade or so have been complaining about Mozilla's wasted effort on Pocket and how no one asked for it and how it was just another Mozilla "scam" and now that it's being removed, ~90% of the comments are "sad" and "I used it a lot."
This is a perfectly reasonable distribution once you consider that only a small fraction of people who really care about something are motivated enough to comment about it.
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.
The two opinions aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
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.
Check out LibreWolf and see if its defaults come closer to what you want. For me, it's better. I still have to modify a few settings, but not nearly as many as with vanilla Firefox.
that's what I thought. I was against the integration and had to make efforts ever since that inappropriate cash-grab. Glad to see it's dead.
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.
Sad to see Pocket shutting down. For anyone seeking alternatives, I've been working on Linkwarden[1], an open-source bookmark manager that hit HN's front page twice[2][3]. Plenty of other great alternatives out there too, such as Raindrop (not fully open-source), Karakeep, and Wallabag.
Also, there's an official Linkwarden mobile app in development, aiming to support most (if not all) of Pocket's key features :)
Are they going to refund money to Premium users who recently subscribed or renewed?
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."
I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What's your other theory? ;-)
+1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)
Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects.
Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.
Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.
As I understand it, Google pay for the searches passed on by the browser. So as long as they have users, they’ll get paid.
The DoJ is arguing in court that Google should be barred from paying off Mozilla because of Google's search monopoly
https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
That's so hilariously backwards.
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.
BRICS is a cancer on par with Google.
I won't argue on this as it's orthogonal.
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.
> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.
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...
I'm curious what the governance structure of Mozilla is that keeps things this way. People have been upset for quite a while at the direction Mozilla is going in, yet there seems to be no coalition to oust the current leadership. Is this impossible for some reason?
I switched to Vivaldi after 23 years of Mozilla. Could not be happier.
mozilla has been broken for a long time. spiritually and intellectually, brave is the successor
All my hopes are with Ladybird now
My hopes are with Servo, I like the novelty of it being implemented in Rust rather than C/C++.
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.
I’m not super familiar with Servo; I’d heard of the Mozilla layoffs but hadn’t followed the work. I believe I can now split my hopes between the Ladybird and Servo; thank you!
And Thunderbird?
It is the MZLA Technologies Corporation a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation a wholly owned part of the Mozilla Foundation.
How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.
Yes. Mozilla was originally only the non profit, but it was ruled that selling the search rights violated nonprofit status. So they paid a couple million in back taxes and had to spin off a corporate entity that's fully owned by the nonprofit.
> A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.
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.
they really went out of their way to include as many "Why" sections and links as possible without saying a single word about why.
the internet is no longer designed to be readable.
it is designed to be profitable.
Its also no longer designed for users, but for the advertisers and bots.
They killed off the live bookmarks feature that I still miss in favor of this and it was never the same.
My rss feeds are still around from then. Glad I didn't invest in this fad.
> available in every other browser
Isn't it because almost every "other browser" reuses the Chromium engine? Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here?
> Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here?
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...
WebKit, which powers Safari on all its platforms has been ahead of Firefox on a number of features.
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
How does that change the basic facts from the end users' perspective?
It doesn't, but the sentence referred to wasn't really aimed at them. I mean, Mozilla could ditch its engine and adopt chromium in order to really focus on advertising, and then it would also support said features from an end users perspective! Somehow I have a feeling that won't earn Mozilla praise.
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.
Have you forgotten Apple and WebKit?
Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML?
> Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML?
Yes… 12 years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl...
They are quite different now.
what happened to opera?
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.
If you want old Opera look into Vivaldi. It's run by old staff from Opera pre sale.
Current Opera is owned by a Chinese company with ties to pay day loans and other shady behaviors.
It's owned by a chinese company and uses Chromium
thanks, guys.
i googled:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)
For users it’s called “putting all your eggs in one basket”
> When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company
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.
I think firefox is going to end up like Opera
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
> every other browser
You can just say Chromium
Safari exists, and is quite popular.
Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform.
Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.
The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge.
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.
I really really wish they would have gone with webkit, even though they could have with some effort used gecko. Just giving up and going blink engine is awful for diversity in browser engines. I don't have much hope for efforts like ladybird, as they're just too small and browsers are a huge ecosystem now.
Microsoft was (and is) interested in Electron. They used it for lots of stuff like MS Teams (which is now using their WebView2 control), VSCode, Outlook, and their Graph toolkit.
Outlook is Electron slop now? Jesus christ.
I think once Apple is forced to allow alternative browsers on the iPhone and iPad, Chrome/Chromium will have won the browser wars.
At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.
That's not going to happen in the USA. at least not in the next several years. I think as long as that's true Safari dominance on iOS will continue.
I don't think people even think about downloading browsers, swear the overwhelming majority of my irl friends only uses the default one on whatever phone, with rare exceptions.
>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.
Microsoft's goal was to make sure the browser didn't obviate Windows.
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.
> Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.
Electron apps have no stake nor impact of any kind in the results of browser market share. None.
Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.
Kagi is starting to build their Orion browser which is WebKit-based for Linux as of this year. I never do anything close enough to the browser engine to know, but apparently devs like WebKit a lot?
Devs like WebKit because it's easy to integrate in non-browsers.
Like for desktop apps? I guess this differs fundamentally from Chromium in that... you do not run the "entire" browser like in Electron?
Since when? I don't see any mention on the blog, and the FAQ still says they're not targeting anything other than MacOS. https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support
It was officially announced late February/early March I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073
> Safari only exist on Apple devices
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:
WebKit 100% exists on Windows and Linux, Microsoft builds it under the playwright project.
I use it occasionally, only for debugging purposes though.
Sure, but fewer (sic) features is mostly a better state of affairs, and apple devices are mostly what matter if you're catering to rich westerners (as most products on this forum try to do).
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.
you can blur the background now at OS level on macOS from the menu bar.
However, WebKit exists elsewhere.
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.
Going purely by (mis)feature count, I'd say they're pretty similar:
https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+136,safari+18.5,firefox+...
WebKit also exists on Linux, albeit not as good as on Darwin.
Not sure how this contradicts the fact that Safari is quite popular.
Apple devices make up over half of all visitors in some markets/segments.
Update: Downvoted for facts, stay classy, HN!
So what? For many people, having to buy new hardware to use it means it isn't a viable alternative browser.
My point was more that it's hard to ignore as a publisher due to its user base, less that it's a viable alternative as a user.
Unfortunately, Safari is also pivoting towards ads in the form of “Help Apple to…”, services and that thing AI companies now call Personal Context. It’s not a bad browser just you wouldn’t pick it for privacy.
I was curious what "view transitions" are even about: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-view-transitions-1/
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.
If you look at their finances you will realize that there is nothing left in that company.
Mozilla appears to be retirement fund for incompetent CxOs...
I also used them before rebranding or even being acquired by Mozilla. I saved some bookmarks then they locked me out because they switched to a paid model. I deleted that app then. Very shortly after i heard they were acquired.
> I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration
And blockchain integration after that.
missing features at this point is laudable.
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)
I loved Pocket. I used it nearly daily. I was often in their top n% of users. I paid for it. Then one day they changed the way their rendering worked on iOS. And it destroyed my workflow.
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.
I bought an Amazon Fire tablet exclusively for Pocket use as well.
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%.
I'm in a similar spot: whenever I browse an article that could be better suited for the Kobo (i.e. admiral cloudberg), I send it to pocket. Right now I don't know how to replace it, because AFAIK Kobo don't allow to install anything similar.
This was one of my considerations when I chose Kobo over Kindle. Very unfortunate, indeed.
Reading pro-Pocket comments is so surreal.
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 don't think anyone was opposed to Pocket-the-product, but its integration into Firefox.
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.
I used Pocket since it was called Read-it-Later back in 2011/2010. It was one of the first things I'd install onto every device I owned.
I used it until their dreadful redesign in 2023.
I got a _lot_ of use out of Pocket.
I've also used it for several years, but it really was never great compared to anything else in this space and seemingly stopped any feature development years ago.
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 loved it when it was called read-it-later and was a standalone add-on. Requiring a Mozilla account made me stop using it.
My feelings are 30% annoyed (because I still have some data in there), 70% hopeful that a thoroughly mediocre contender is going a way and some more consolidation in this market might finally create critical mass for and focus on some open-source, data-exportable solution in the way Omnivore unfortunately couldn't.
Check the barebones but functional Wallabag. Hosted version available for a fee.
Wallabag looks great, if a little homebrew. I signed up and had to laugh that the default "Welcome to wallabag" article could not be retrieved. Regardless, I decided to give 'em 12 bucks and see how it goes.
Just to add that you can also self-host it, and it supports Kobo as well. I once stumbled upon but didn't investigate further since Pocket just worked so well. I guess now I will have to.
It’s the lack of nice sync to an articles directory that’ll be missed. I’m also bitten by this shutdown.
I'm with you, I use Pocket all the time on my Kobo as well - I need to cobble together some self-hosted alternative. Did you find another alternative besides Omnivore?
I still use the self-hosted version of Omnivore - I had built quite a lot around it so when that shut down I just decided to transfer over.
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.)
One thing that unfortunately never got properly announced, is that over time Pocket was slowly open sourced piece-by-piece, mostly as it got rewritten/modernised, as I understand it: https://github.com/Pocket/
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.)
Kind of a bit "too little too late" when they're still open-sourcing it but by bit in 2025 after promising to open-source it during the acquisition in 2017. I'm not very impressed.
It wasn't started in 2025, it's a process that's been going on for years. (Presumably, but I don't actually have more information here, the pre-acquisition codebase couldn't easily be open sourced without rewriting for legal reasons, e.g. copyright residing with someone else.)
Nothing about the communication at the time indicated that publishing the source code would happen gradually over a decade. For all intents and purposes, what was promised was that it would be open source within some reasonably short time frame.
> 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 not contain tags or highlights.
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.
You can connect Pocket to Readwise Reader ( readwise.io/reader ), via Pocket's API, which will let Reader view all the tags, metadata, highlights, etc.
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)
So your app will also import the archived copies from Pocket? It's mainly about importing archived content from links that might now be dead.
No, unfortunately their API doesn't return the actual html content of the saved articles :( just the urls and all the metadata: highlights, title, author, image, tags, location, etc
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.
Would be awesome if your app could scrape the actual pocket pages.
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.
something these other apps could do is run dead URLs through archive.org and nab it that way.
Not 100% foolproof but I'm willing to bet it will work for the majority of links
Love your app. Any plans to enable reading of Readwise Reader articles on eReaders like Kobo? I’m thinking of something akin to how Pocket’s integration with Kobo.
Thanks! Kobo is hard because it's proprietary software, but we would like 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 :)
seems to work better with https://fabiensanglard.net/rss.xml than most readers although it still gets 403s fetching images but I'll still give it a run to see how it works for me.
I think the image urls provided in the RSS feed are just broken, eg this one is linked in the latest article:
https://fabiensanglard.net/2168/french.webp
Thanks. Will try. Currently Pocket seems to be overloaded, but hopefully it recovers in the 30 trial days.
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.
Cool! The import should auto-retry, but in case something gets snagged there you can also always do `cmd+k -> pocket` to retrigger a full import.
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 can't even connect to Pocket.
Not to mention they charged $45 a year for a service that included backups in their cloud should your save become a dead link. Imagine paying that amount for several years and when you need it they pull the rug.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250321050043/https://getpocket...
On that archived page: "A forever home for your collection"
Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.
Yeah this is really lame. I used it because I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands.
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.
I'm with you. I think it's great that Mozilla is trying/tried to extend their value beyond just the browser.
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.
Mozilla's track record of shutting down projects is almost as bad as Google's. I wouldn't count on any of their non-Firefox projects lasting very long.
> I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands.
Never trust a company like this. You'll always get burned. If it's not FOSS, its not reliable and will likely burn you
> I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction
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
The tags are exported : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-l...
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.
The page was "Last updated: 24 minutes ago". Someone at Mozilla saw this HN post and modified it (unsure if the export feature itself was changed or not).
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...
My export from March had tags, my guess is this docs page just got missed when they updated the export months ago
I migrated to raindrop.io[1] few months back and IIRC the file downloaded from Pocket did have tags. I again tried following the same steps and the CSV does have tags so I'm not sure why they save the export will not have tags?
[1] https://raindrop.io/integrations/pocket
Not sure what they mean by tags, but my export seems to have all my tags.
I just got my export, and it has the tags.
Fields are: title, url, time_added, tags, and status
The tags field is a pipe-separated list of tags
the csv file I downloaded has a column for tags, pipe separated
anyone have any good suggestions for a self-hosted option?
I've tried all of the options: Linkwarden, Linkding, Karakeep, Shiori, Wallabag, Grimoire—you name it, I've tried it. These are all great tools, and I use Karakeep myself, but I use it to bookmark and archive links, not as a "read it later" tool.
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
They open sourced some stuff already https://github.com/Pocket
I use linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
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
https://readeck.org/en/
There’s also linkwarden
https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden
Too colourful for me, can’t like the design
And there’s also karakeep
https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
I wrote this Deno script to convert the Pocket CSV export to a Bookmark HTML-file so that it can be imported to Linkding: https://github.com/enjikaka/pocket-to-bookmark
There is readeck, linkwarden and karakeep. Each has a slight different focus (readeck probably has the most read it later focus). There is also omnivore, but I have been struggling to get it to work selhosting (there currently is a bug that prevents signing in), it is also quite resource heavy.
Oh man. I have been working on a side project just for this purpose. The aim is to create a pocket like experience (with additional functionality like handling other media types) that is local first, unhosted, and more future-proof (no lock in).
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 don't understand the Linkding recommendations.
AFAICT Linkding is a bookmarking app, much like Pinboard, not a read-later app like Pocket.
I totally understand you and it seems that a lot of users like myself were using pocket as way to sync bookmarks across devices as well.
Also, linkding offers a way to read it later by using the singlefilextension https://linkding.link/archiving/
Thanks for the clarification.
This might come off as dismissive, but after using services like Delicious from way back, I've more or less ended up using Obsidian to edit a few markdown files that contain links to stuff I liked.
I know there are services that offer more, but if I look at how I __actually__ used them, this does the trick.
I'm using & developing Omnom (read-only demo: https://omnom.zone/ ). It is self-hosted, free software, fediverse compatible and creates 1:1 snapshots of the saved websites: https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom
Great project name!
WordPress + Friends + Post Collection plugins (+send to e-reader), see https://youtu.be/kHaODAUazwE?t=214
I've been using https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding and highly recommend it.
I've been using Readeck, but I never actually used pocket, so I'm not sure how comparable they are.
Karakeep is good. You can import the pocket bookmarks. It can do automatic AI tagging.
Downthemall might help with downloading all those links, depending on what they are.
I never used Pocket but was a long time user of Instapaper before moving to Readwise Reader. My experience has been that many links, other than the most recent ones, are dead.
> 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.
> Who will you trust?
Your-self-hosted?
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.
Code? For self-hosting? I hope not. Most programmers shouldn’t be programming internet-facing stuff. (FWIW I include myself in “most programmers”).
Get it from your repository. In that case you are trusting somebody like Debian or Redhat. They’ve earned an awful lot of trust.
Are we on Hacker News?
Yeah, bit weird - surely the population of HN is either going to be
- people who _can_ code it themselves, or
- people who believe they can get AI to code it for them
I'm in a third group:
people who can decide if somebody else's code is "good enough" to host it themselves
It's a pity Sandstorm never super took off. Portable serverless with really nice security built in meant really easy to deploy apps; app server just for you or for a group of people was so nice & easy.
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.
I'm self-hosting a couple of services that stopped receiving updates (including security updates) about 10 years ago. They still serve my needs perfectly well. They're hidden behind HTTP authentication (with HTTPS) so the internet noise ("AI" shit, web scrapers, shodan, script kiddies) doesn't even know they exist.
> Who will you trust? Google?
Google has very good/complete Takeout data for most of its services.
What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.
> What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.
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).
iTunes Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping. I never trusted Apple after they got rid of that /s
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...
His point is about data portability, not service uptime.
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.
It does include tags
I trust none of that ones, only Google for one of my emails and my Android phone. The track of abandoned services of Mozilla is astonishing.
Chasing the ever-cycling list of organizations that haven't yet betrayed trust with regards to privacy. If you're going to go with the "who can you trust" angle then you need to qualify that with a type of product.
Also?
An organization's past doesn't dictate their present.
[dead]
Super bummed about this.
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 have been paying for readwise for about a year and a half now. I was a pocket subscriber for years before they got bought out by Firefox. All that said, I wouldn't call myself an advanced user of either (tag a lot less than I would like, want to revisit more than I do, etc.).
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.
That is definitely one of the biggest painpoints, and we feel it ourselves for whatever it's worth!
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!
I only use Reader. What's the other for?
Been using readwise. I quite like it. I'll gladly pay the price if it means preventing encrapification down the road.
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 pay for Readwise Reader and it's pretty great, although I have been noticing issues extracting the full text on certain sites. It sometimes just seems to give up and the extract contains an empty block and is 1/10 of the expected length. A bit frustrating since that's my main use case.
I tried Matter but it lacked Android support at the time so didn't go deep into it. I've been a heavy Readwise user for the last two years or so. It's better than Pocket in almost every way, although as I've moved into the 99.9th percentile of archive size I'm seeing some annoying perf issues they'll hopefully fix. At least they have a Discord and are making actual updates to the app, something that Pocket stopped doing probably five years ago.
I can't recommend Raindrop enough if you're looking for alternatives
I have been using Obsidian Web Clipper to save stuff to read later. If you already use Obsidian it's worth a shot. It's not perfect but it does a reasonable job of translating articles etc. into markdown. I don't actually know if it saves images locally, I suspect not (which is probably a pretty big weakness)
I'm using the free version of Matter, and it seems like a good improvement over Pocket. It managed to import most of my Pocket saves too.
I used Matter for a few weeks and it was fine. The email newsletter collection is interesting but it's sort of a paywalled feature and I didn't really use it much. Several other paywalled features I wasn't interested in. At the time I really wanted an iOS widget and I don't think Matter had one, so I bounced. I'm using Feedly now and really like it, especially for the suggested news RSS feeds. I get by with a free account and it feels like they don't try to convert you very often... Unfortunately the act of adding a new bookmark is weirdly slow on my phone. Maybe that's just my device.
> 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 exported my data, and tags were there.
I think this is good, I'd like to see more side projects that don't directly relate to the core web browser shutdown in favour of browser performance, compliance and feature parity.
I really enjoyed https://waldenpond.press/ when it was up and running. They selected articles from your pocket once a month and then printed, bound, and mailed them to you. When I discovered the service I had a 500 hour reading backlog, and for $14/mo I was getting 100+ page books of self-curated content. They were perfect for flights, trips, and lending out. I was able to force it to include recipes as well, and I still find myself referencing them frequently.
I would have absolutely loved this. I would love for someone to do this with Substack or podcast transcripts.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but I built this YouTube/podcast to text free tool in case you want to try it and prefer reading instead of watching.
You would still have to read it in a digital screen but at least it is a black theme and a simple and clean UX/UI.
https://cofyt.app
If I’d have known about them sooner, they’d have all my money.
Seems like official export [0] has tags and annotations along with timestamps. However in case you'd like more structured full data from the API (instead of a mess with csv + json?), you can use my tool [1] to export it. Here's example of its output [2]
[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-...
I still use Firefox but if Ladybird and Servo get adblock, video download, dark mode, I am jumping ship.
Everytime people talked about Mozilla or Firefox the main complaint was Pocket. Everytime. Yet most people here are sad to see it go. What gives?
If you don't use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because they spent a bunch of money buying an unrelated company to add a feature you don't want. If you do use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because you don't want to be relying on a weird side project of a company because they'll do a terrible job of maintaining it and it'll inevitably get shut down.
This is exactly correct. And everything happened exactly as written!
like grape jelly and tomato soup, two great tastes that don't belong together.
Some people hated pocket, and would complain about it. Different people liked pocket and are commenting here.
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).
Nicely articulated. I think their comment encapsulates the disbelief people have about public opinions that differ from their own political viewpoints (and the aspects that had been amplified within their own media/algorithmic bubble).
The complainers were FF users forced to deal with bloat they didn't use, those who are sad here are pocket users. They're just different people. Though, even those who didn't like the bundling of the extension probably didn't actively want the service to fail.
Right. I would be one of the people who saw pocket as an unnecessary distraction, but even I tested it and my opinion is partly based on pocket just not working in my Firefox at the time. I also just did not like that it was given space in the toolbar while a way more important rss button was denied that space. And despite that, I still think the shutdown now is bad - this should be spun out or be moved to a Foss project, and certainly not be killed for more ai nonsense.
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.
Pocket was pushed pretty heavily and basically shoved down the throat of Firefox users. Many obviously complained about this behaviour, either because they had no use for Pocket or already had a different solution. Mozilla was basically mimicking Microsoft behaviour of just forcing products/features onto it's users.
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'm quite happy about it. I might even print out a tombstone to piss on.
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.
I think it's consistent to be annoyed that they went and bought something and shoved it into everyone's browser, but also that they're taking away a service that people have come to depend on.
There are lots of people with different opinions on the same subject, and not all of them speak up in the same conversations.
Some call this phenomenon the Goomba fallacy.
After about 5 minutes of reading, I'm proclaiming that its proper name shall be the "hivemind fallacy".
People who are happy about something have no reason to post.
You're talking about two entirely different groups of people even though they're all on HN.
That's not true, I sing the praises of things that bring me value all the time. I am, arguably, getting pretty close to "shill" category for some of them. However, I think that behavior should get a pass if the things being shilled are actually FOSS and not just "change from one company to the other"
I think statistically I'm still right. Complaints are always more frequent than positive comments -- and more unsolicited. I always factor that in when reading, for example, product reviews. While there are always people willing to sing the praises of products they like, the average content person is likely to just move on with their lives, and a wronged person cannot wait to tell everyone.
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.
Different groups of people.
Maybe they were different people?
This is what confused me coming into this thread too! I was wondering what it'd be like consider how widely unpopular pocket is around here. Enough that anytime Firefox is brought up people point to pocket. No one defending it at those times so at just hear negatives. I'm sure there are plenty of different users but it's interesting to see what opinions dominate a thread at a given time.
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)_/¯
There are some from the Pocket disliking group that have made comments here. I bet most don't care that much.
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.
I recognize these are different groups and HN isn't a homogeneous entity.
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.
I built Obsidian Web Clipper (open source, MIT) to replace my read-it-later app and save everything to local markdown files. Now that Obsidian Bases is available, it makes for a very nice web archival tool and reading experience. Here's a video:
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:
https://github.com/kepano/defuddle
https://github.com/kepano/defuddle-cli
Thank you for your work on this! It's become my go-to since leaving Pocket.
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.
This is very cool.
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?
Since the content is saved to Markdown you can use it with pretty much any tool that will ingest that content.
There's also Obsidian Web Clipper's Interpreter feature, which lets you run prompts on a web page before saving:
https://help.obsidian.md/web-clipper/interpreter
There are a ton of bookmarking software, and good, and self-hosted.
- 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
[2] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
[3] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database
omnivore got acquired, they shut down: https://web.archive.org/web/20250503155629/https://blog.omni...
It is Self-Hostable. I worked on the self-hosting stuff. Follow the guide here if you're interested: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/blob/main/self-host...
I've been wanting a tool that does exactly one thing, keep the bookmarks of Firefox and Chrome synced on my local PC. I don't want collaboration, distributed, cloud first, SaaS, friends, notifications, tags, AI, or anything else. Any suggestions for a tool like that?
Don't forget Readeck. I've been super pleased with it. (Omnivore is dead btw.)
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
>> 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).
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.
I have used Wallabag[0] for read-later articles for many years. Very happy about it. I host it on a VPS but they offer a paid instance[1] themselves for $9/y. And otherwise you can use something like Pikapods[2] which is also dirt cheap.
[0] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag [1] https://www.wallabag.it/en [2] https://www.pikapods.com/apps
It would probably make more sense to link to the blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-whats-next/
Also, it's not just Pocket, it's also Fakespot, which I didn't even know existed.
I would say I was sad to see it go, but I moved to karakeep (formerly known as Hoarder) a few months ago and it's been a perfect replacement. Most importantly, you can self-host it - which is great.
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
I started using Pocket in 2012 and have used it ever since (though I’ll obviously have to stop now). It was a great way to save interesting articles I didn’t have time to read right away. Naturally, I rarely got around to actually reading them, and the backlog kept growing. I just exported my data and found 13,000 unread articles out of a total of 34,000.
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."
This might be a more manual solution for Kobo imports, but I've taken to saving pages of interest via Joplin's web clipper extension. Pages can be saved as Markdown, HTML, screenshot, or URL. If I save the Markdown version (typically looks fine), it will have also saved linked images. Exporting that to another folder gives me something that I can convert to epub, using Pandoc. From there, it's trivial to copy over to my Kobo as before. Of course, this already would have been readable on my phone, since my notebooks also sync across devices.
I used Pocket until they remove the ability to save page as offline (moved to premium tier afak) and also shoving sponsored content here and there.
I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than ~~useless~~ useful to me.
[1]Raindrop.io
> I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than useless to me.
Low bar to hit.
Oops a typo.
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.
> I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than ~~useless~~ useful to me.
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.”
I’ve been using Raindrop and have used the Permanent Copy (offline) feature enough that I wouldn’t consider doing without it. It’s worth every penny if you ask me. And you can host it yourself AFAIK, I just haven’t looked into it much.
So what did this do?
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?
It's not important what it is. Pocket was bought overpriced by Mozillas incompetent officers on a project to diversify their income by playing VC. They then decided to piss all over their Firefox browser users by forcefully integrating it with the browser. It was a terrible decision, a terrible business, and now way past its best by date its finally taken out to pasture. Sadly the incompetent officers continue their tenure and soon we'll write this obituary for Mozilla, as their C-level compensation inevitably outstrips what Google is willing to pay for a 1% market share and declining browser.
Kobo (ereader) + Pocket was always just an amazing and low friction combo. This blows.
I was a paying Pocket customer until a few weeks ago. I switched to Wallabag plus https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako/ to sync to my Kobo. It's not polished, but honestly neither was Pocket with their decline in both article parsing and the iOS apps over the last few years.
Hopefully this situation encourages more contribution and improvement to tools like these.
I used this a lot, and had a tool specifically to replace it with another service. I see others created a fork too. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter
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.
What if Rakuten reimplemented their own version of Pocket and offered it as a Firefox add-on? A man can dream.
Was really considering using https://www.reademaillater.com/ to sync long newsletters (mainly Matt Levine, which isn't available free on the web but is via email) to my Kobo, and this sucks.
Yep, this got me hooked on pocket as well. I had/have so many articles on there that ar easy to read on a bus / train / plane or in bed before falling asleep.
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?
My first thought as well. I wonder what Kobo will do in response to this announcement.
Me too, I hope there will be a replacement with the same low friction.
I've been using IFTTT with RSS feeds to add serialized stories to my Kobo as they release.
They should be able to change it with fairly minimal changes. I managed to modify some things to proxy articles from Omnivore to it, and the functionality remained largely the same across the two services.
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.
This is the primary way I read longer articles on the internet. I hope something else pops up because this changes my daily routine pretty significantly.
They should at least allow to download their copy of the saved articles, PDF or HTML or whatever format they save it in.
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 think doing this would expose how poorly they've actually saved their copies of articles. Pocket has always had a very funny definition of "permanent copy" which doesn't mean what you think it does! I'm a little saddened by their demise but the service has been so terrible for so long that I've long since moved to the much superior Readwise.
A little surprised to see the sadness regarding something that seemed to be universally scorned whenever it was brought up. I never tried it and don't really have an opinion, but why couldn't this functionality be created as an extension (possibly connecting to a 3rd party service? I don't know why that would be necessary. Can extensions throw stuff into firefox sync?)?
An extension is what it was, before Firefox bought it. It's what it still is, on other browsers.
I used it to save things, and read it on multiple devices. The readability view was never my chief concern.
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.
Yes, extensions can save into Firefox Sync.
I remember requesting the source code after they bought it[1]. They kept kicking the can down the road. It looks like they dumped everything in a monorepo on Github[2] which does nothing good for anyone.
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
What's wrong with a monorepo?
Ugh, and that only months after Omnivore (a really great FOSS "read it later" app) shut down.
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'm very sad about this. The one feature that I really like is that you could read articles offline. Any good alternatives?
(saves this HN post to Pocket to come back to it later to see replies)
I've been using Instapaper for years and have always been very happy with it.
If you like Self-Hosting - Omnivore is still a fantastic product. And the iOS app has been recently fixed to work with Self-Hosting!
https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore
Mozilla continues to appear to not get the philosophies behind open source. If they really wanted to help people and not simply try to get market share and make money, they'd examine ways to make Pocket itself open source, including the server end of things.
"We're handing this over to a non-profit" would be nice.
Looks like much of it is. https://github.com/Pocket
Not sure how complete it is. But appears to have a typescript backend included.
Upon reading this at first I was like "Oh, crap!", but then after a minute I realized that I wasn't bother to export my saved articles... it was basically digital hoarding, for me, I think. While I did use it, I likely won't miss it.
Saving links and offline reading is dime a dozen nowadays, but the one BIG feature was recommended articles, which basically opened the reading list of the world and you could read extremely interesting longform articles based on your list. It was the best magazine you could imagine. But I guess it required maintenance and moderation so they axed it - in the typical fashion of an acquired product I might say.
I still wish for something like this with privacy in mind and community maintained.
I'm not sure what you're missing from all the existing discover features in other products, but NewsBlur has a feature that sounds like that. https://blog.newsblur.com/2025/02/02/discover-related-storie...
> the one BIG feature was recommended articles
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.
You could try Wallabag. It provides 3 separate RSS feeds per saved link status, that could trigger IFTT.
Ah, I'm talking about feeding -into- Pocket. I haven't found anything except Instapaper that has direct IFTTT actions for saving URLs or anything which natively supports a webhook kind of thing for saving (but I'm sure there must be something because it seems such an obvious thing to support!)
You might be able to scrape archive sites or create search queries that you use to determine fresh or trending archives or domains?
I think it's really hard to replicate the "people save this article for later" pedigree without actually having this information.
True, there are a lot of bots that use Internet Archive, which is probably the easiest to scrape. Maybe ask Jason Scott of Archive Team if he has any ideas for how to use IA and other archives for this purpose, and for ideas about how else to get this data?
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.
I feel bad saying I'm happy that they're shutting it down, but it should never have been built into the browser and forced on people.
Focus on making a decent browser and let extensions be extensions.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-whats-next/
Thank you for the link. I didn't realize Fakespot is also getting shut down. I guess these acquisitions didn't work out so well profit-wise, but it's good to see more focus on their core browser.
The "Save to Pocket" button at the bottom is a nice touch.
My little side project has been chugging along for those looking for (harder to use) variation of Pocket.
https://tinygem.org
The main advantage is that content recommendations based on previously saved content are pretty good, especially for tech oriented crowd.
This is actually promising, kudos!
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.
This sucks :(
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.
My specific need is I like to reference articles I've read later, quickly. I was using Pocket to track links to articles I've read, keeping them categorized with tags. It's been a mediocre solution for this need (e.g. I'd like to add more metadata, such as notes), but I haven't found too many apps/products that serve this use case.
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
Have you looked at larder.io?
Browser integrations, tags and search works fine, but the notes functionality (“Description”) is very limited.
They bought pocket for at least 5 million, what a waste of money.
Pocket was revenue positive for a while, they probably still made money on it.
Compared to the other ways Mozilla has set money on fire while taking its eye off the ball, $5 million is immaterial really.
It's significantly less than the ceo salary, albeit the yearly one.
$5 million is pocket change.
No, it's Pocket change. Which could be better spent on the CEO's salary!
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18b6tdp/mozilla_c...
Can someone explain what this means?
>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.
Mozilla owns Fakespot. Fakepost is pretty unreliable and assigning a score to something so difficult to rank isn't a great model.
Such a shame and wasted potential. Mozilla could have turned Pocket into a read it later + RSS reader killer combo that would have closed the browsing loop across the web on Firefox. But they slept on it, actively worsening it and finally putting it out of its misery. This is an end of an era and it has such a chime of finality to it.
Sort of peculiar that a company that is based on and makes open source software wouldn't wind down Pocket as a product but release it to the community. I don't have any particular wish to use it--I moved on years ago--but it's odd at a sort of ethical level that Mozilla, of all companies, would disappear software.
Another feature no one asked for, meeting its technological grave. For those few users of Pocket this function could have been easily handled as an extension.
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.
Firefox has the "killer app" for modern browsers--ublock origin.
I am dismayed by how much money Mozilla spends on things other than the browser, though.
Ad blocking should just be an integral browser feature at this point, as in Brave or Vivaldi.
IIRC they promised to make Pocket open source, but I'm not sure if the back end ever was. Does anyone know if this is the case?
Seems like a big win for Instapaper, who will likely pick up a lot of Pocket's abandoned users.
Might save someone a few clicks: https://getpocket.com/export
I've used Pocket in combination with the In My Pocket add-on for a very long time on a daily basis. I don't particularly care about the online specific features, I don't care about syncing, or any of that. I've used Pocket specifically as a better and quicker Bookmarking tool than the browser's default to save pages I want to read later, simple as that and it worked flawlessly.
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.
The think I liked about pocket was the integration with my Kobo ebook reader. I could browse the web on my phone or laptop and "add to pocket" for later, then could fire up my ereader and read the articles formatted nicely on my epaper screen.
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
Kobo supports ReadWise I think.
> 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
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 wonder if they’d be willing to sell it to the right group of folks. I’d love to have a community owned read it later service. Otherwise, we’re all on a never ending treadmill from one service to the next.
I'm strangely sad about this, even though this became yet another place for my bookmarks to go to die.
did anyone ever offer a method of detecting link rot in bookmarks automagically? i gave up on using bookmarks a very long time ago after finding so many links no longer working.
Not automatically but when you open a dead link you can ease the pain by using an extension such as "page archive" [1] to quickly search an archive such as the wayback machine and perhaps get something useful out of it.
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/
While the Kobo app is still available an alternative might be:
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.
Isn’t Omnivore discontinued? I didn’t hear what happened when they joined ElevenLabs.
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:
https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/4462
Pocket and other similar services always ended up becoming a virtual junk drawer for me, as I was just hoarding content to consume when I have free time, but time never realyl freed itself up and content just kept pilling in. In the end, it just became one of those annoying things that I have to disable on a new installation of Firefox.
I used the mediocre TTS to listen to text articles while driving.
I abandoned Pocket a while ago. I believe the offline mode was unreliable. Instapaper has been a really good replacement for me. My use case is to queue up articles to read on my iPad without distractions.
Dang, like many others I use Pocket extensively - especially with my Kobo e-reader. This is very sad!
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
Crap. My Kobo Libra supports Pocket as its only built-in way to get articles onto the device. I use GoodLinks to store links I like, and have a Shortcut that copies new articles from GoodLinks to Pocket. If I’m reading something interesting but long, I bookmark it, and that evening it’s on my ereader waiting for me.
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?
They were told it was a mistake to buy it, they didn't listen, like they never listen. I used to love the organization but it's so resistant to outside input that I had to leave the community about 12 years ago.
I use pocket all the time to save articles to read on my kobo, which has a pretty good first-party integration in the OS.
I wonder what Rakuten are going to do.
Same and it's my favourite Kobo feature. I hope Mozilla releases Pocket source code for people willing to self-host it. Kobos are highly hackable and I'm sure the community will find a way to change getpocket.com domain in the built-in Pocket app, even if Rakuten chooses not to provide this option.
I'm not one for external services piggybacked onto other software, but the ability to quickly send something to my Kobo has been a godsend.
edit: I had no idea Mozilla actually bought Pocket. Mental that they're willing to shut it down
I wonder if Rakuten can buy pocket from mozilla, their integration is so good
[dead]
switched from Pocket to Readwise Reader last year, haven’t looked back. It’s a paid app ($10/month) but totally worth it IMO
I’ve been having trouble with Pocket’s offline mode and TTS feature for a while, and just migrated (yesterday!) to Obsidian via Obsidian Web Clipper (automated using Pupeteer).
Obsidian doesn’t have all the features necessary for a read-it-later app, but almost!
Obsidian is phenomenal. I only wish it were open source so I could self-host it. Sometimes I worry that they'd sell my notes data to advertisers.
Obsidian cannot access your notes even if you use the Sync service (it's end-to-end encrypted)
This really hurts. All my content consumption workflow depends on Pocket, I shortlist from my rss reader (inoreader) directly into pocket, then ot gets synced with readwise reader automatically where I listen to the chosen articles [1]. I also use my pocket account's archive as a collection of the articles and writings I have liked (planning to build a personal and simple content recommendation system for myself). [1] https://saeedesmaili.com/posts/my-content-consumption-workfl...
What are you going to replace it with?
Not sure yet. Since I'm already paying for readwise, I might use that, but then sharing from inoreader to readwise will be multiple steps instead of the current built in pocket integration I use. I should also make sure I'm keeping a local archive of read and unread stuff just in case. I'll also contact inoreader to see if they will replace their built-in pocket integration with anything else.
I had submitted the Mozilla blog post about this and Fakespot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063930) but this submission seems to have received the traction. I added a comment to my submission pointing here.
Email the mods about this and they can cleanup and merge the dupes.
Well, there aren't any dupes. :-) But thanks.
Backflip to Delicious to Pocket.
Why isn’t there a simple bookmarking solution that can survive technology shifts?
Products going away is saddening and maddening but if there’s demand surely these good ideas should be fought over.
What’s going on for the market not to stably fill this gap? Is there no workable price point?
I was a premium user of pocket for almost a decade before mozilla bought it and I remained a user for another few years after the acquisition. Mozilla turned it into garbage that didn't even do it's job properly and it is a bit sad to see it shut down.
Damn, this one really hurts.
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?
Your experience and mine is almost exactly the same, down to the subway being the place where I used Pocket the most.
given mozilla makes a fantastic email client - thunderbird - you would think they would have made pocket multimedia but alas
A bunch of alternatives were already mentioned. If you’re looking for an rss feed reader that can also save links directly, Lighthouse[1] may be an option.
[1]: https://lighthouseapp.io/
I have been using Pocket + p2k for long articles that I prefer to read on Kindle. There are several issues with the setup, but this works well enough for most articles that I have sticked to it over the years. Looks like I have to find an alternative now.
One issue I've had with read-it-later apps is that I end up accumulating far too many articles and never actually reading them. Now my approach is simple: if I see something I want to read, I either read it immediately or never.
If you ever take a train (those where everyone has a seat) or flight, those are long hours perfect for reading.
There could be a better system (for me): a read-it-later app with a strict limit—say, 3 or 5 slots. If it's full and you add a new article, the oldest one gets automatically deleted to make room. That way, you always have something to read, but never feel overwhelmed by an endless backlog.
For me, this is just browser tabs. Modern browsers seem to do a good enough job with both persisting tab state between sessions and not expending tons of resources on idle tabs. So I just pop the article of interest up in a new tab and leave it there until I get back to it.
Truth be told, my relationship with Pocket has dipped significantly over the years. According to my email, I signed up for Read It Later in March of 2011, which coincided with the release of their Android beta. It was the first thing I installed on every new browser or phone, and for many years, my end of the year recap had me at the top 1% of readers.
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.
Don’t have time to read this so I saved it in Pocket, I’ll probably get to it in a few months…
But in all seriousness I’ve got about 1000 articles I need to store and browse…somewhere when Pocket EoLs
I have never relied on a browser for "favorites" or "bookmarks"
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?
Pocket was very convenient to send random articles to my Kobo, which comes with a Pocket integration. Great for reading long blog posts and such, easier on the eyes. Will miss it.
This made me sad because I served my need so well. Now I will have to think about alternatives. I wish they could open-source it.
Huh, that’s annoying. Been using pocket since around 2008, mainly for when I was abroad and roaming was costly. Looks like I’ll need to export my library of stuff.
Do I have any other similar options?
Can we get a list going of the best substitutes and the pros/cons? Thanks.
Well, crap. I've had a Pocket account for more than ten years. It's a key feature on my Kobo devices, to boot.
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 use KOReader [1] on my Kobo. It supports Wallabag [2]. Wallabag offers both hosted [3] and self-hosted options. There's also a standalone kobo client for Wallabag [4]. In addition, Wallabag also supports direct import from Pocket.
[1] https://koreader.rocks/
[2] https://wallabag.org/
[3] https://www.wallabag.it/en
[4] https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako
Thanks, just set it up via koreader that I already had installed.
Any opinion on using wallabako vs koreader? koreader might involve some more steps to sync it looks like?
This is amazing. Thank you!
Pocket has pretty much exclusively been a, “send article to Kobo” button for me thanks to the integration.
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.
https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-monorepo
(shameless plug)
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
Replying to deleted comment by jsheard:
> 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.
Damn, what alternative can we look for ? (free, ideally open source)
Seems Obsidian Web Clipper is a good alternative, it can save as markdown so you own the data offline. Anyone tried it? What is your experience?
It isn't available on mobile AFAIK, which is like my primary use for pocket etc., saving links to later read on my laptop
Obsidian Web Clipper is available on all mobile browsers that support extensions including Safari, Firefox, and some forks of Chrome
https://apps.apple.com/app/obsidian-web-clipper/id6720708363...
Alternative is using iOS share with Obsidian.
I use it pretty extensively. Aside from being a pretty poor experience on mobile (it straight up can't be used on iOS at all, works ok on Android), it's the best web clipper I've used.
I really wish they would integrate the functionality into Obsidian itself, though I think there are technical limitations with it.
I literally just used Obsidian Web Clipper on iOS+Safari.
I haven't tried it, but I have used Notion Web Clipper. It works, but the experience is nowhere near the same.
[dead]
I've never understood Pocket. What's wrong with Zotero?
Is there anything (preferabbly local-first, and sync with dropbox or any other service) that simply snips the article (preferably using simlar tech as "reader mode"), and something that supports other media? (youtube videos, instagram reels, etc)
Finally, it was so annoying in my browser
Can someone suggest a good bookmarking app that can be used offline, as well as great typography and neat bookmarking of social media videos? Absolutely. At least embed and show it correctly.
I've never used Pocket, so I can't comment on feature parity, but for people looking for an alternative I've been using Instapaper for years and have been very happy with it. The founders recently bought it back from Pinterest and have been making steady improvements.
Pinterest sold it in 2018. The founder is Marco Arment, he's not the one who bought it back.
But yes, instapaper is still alive.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/instapaper-is-leaving-pint...
Ah, OK - I must have misread the bit about who bought it from Pinterest.
Have been using FF since early 2000's. Tried using Pocket but never really got the hang of it. Just never felt that it fixed a problem was having.
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.
I was a very heavy pocket user and loved it, but around 2019 they changed their Discover tab, so you could no longer see the source of the article.
The pages were listed as ‘Pocket’ source, and they windowed the original article in a pocket page with ads
I moved off Pocket a couple years ago and moved to Readwise which is great (paid was a desired feature).
Anyone else have a favorite alternative?
We have been working on Full Sort for a while now. Lots of features to be a contender but not bloated either. Take a look at https://fullsort.com.
Demo without signup. Upon signup the service is free. Not mining your data either.
This is sad! I use it daily. Not sure what tool to replace this with.
Seems odd that it's not being sold off. Was it truly that worthless?
It was also a great way to read paywalled articles for free.
I'd love for everyone to move to https://histre.com/ :-) (which I built)
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856801
I use it to collect articles for my newsletter. Any alternatives? (Free, Browser extension, API)
Raindrop: https://raindrop.io/
How can we export the backups from premium version? Let me guess—we can only export the URLs.
I recommend Readwise.
Good. Less dependence on external servers.
Now for better local bookmarks.
Seems like very short notice!
So much wasted potential, I was a top 1% reader for a couple years (mostly because I saved a lot of things probably); it was a convenient way to save articles and references in multiple devices but at the end I was frustated it was so cumberstone to keep links organized.
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.
Just in time for them to shove more crypto and ai into a bloody web browser...
Damn, I'm a user and sad about this. Whats alternative?
A read-it-later app. Pocket, you had one job. Just one job. And for a while that was my killer app on mobile. But, as we see, the enshitification of the web continues.
"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."
So Mozilla is shutting down Pocket completely by July, and this is under their new CEO Laura Chambers who took over in February 2024. Meanwhile Mitchell Baker - who was pulling in $6.9M by 2022 - just bailed out entirely this February after "focusing on AI and internet safety" for exactly one year.
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."
Pocket was always completely incompatible with Mozilla/Firefox, and is at this point hopelessly outdated compared to all competitors. I really don't understand what they were thinking.
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.
I am worried about Firefox Sync now, hope it survives
Any good alternatives which can import my pocket data?
Readwise Reader should be a great option
Oh no, what happened? Oh no, how terrible! That's just awful, how terrible oh no! [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQFF0oqsto
Pocket users in shambles until they realize Ctrl + D exists
Good riddance.
So disappointed. I had such high hopes when Mozilla acquired them, specifically for the integration with Firefox.
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.
Another day, yet another service that I used shut down. It does make one want to get better at programming and build one's own solutions since these multi-million and billion dollar companies are more concerned with shareholder value than their users.
It is a time to rejoice and celebrate, for a product that never should have existed has died today.
This follows the long history of projects like Google+ and hopefully others like Facebook Watch will follow soon.
Annoying, I used this. It seems self-hosted wallabag might be the way to go.
This hurts. I used pocket as a "read later" or "will not read now" tool.
I think a smarter move in this context is to pass the product (even much simplified) to a company that can maintain it.
What is a good alternative?
Readwise Reader, paid service from a bootstrapped company, kind of ensures it won’t randomly kill the product
Also: They are users of their own product
The writing was on the wall for Pocket when paywalls started to go up everywhere a few years ago. By that point, it could no longer scrape articles reliably.
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.
I've got years of saved articles in there and the export situation is pretty bad. It only gives you the URLs, not the actual content. So if a site goes down (which happens all the time), you're basically screwed.
I'm thinking about throwing Claude Code at this problem and building a proper exporter that actually saves the content.
I've been using FF since it was Mozilla Phoenix and I never once tried Pocket.
I'll take it off their hands.
I guess good that i never used it and it was the first thing to disable from policies.json
Lmao.
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.
Self-hosted alternatives: Karakeep and Linkwarden
They are also shuttering Fakespot which they acquired for an untold amount of money in 2023. Sounds like this little attempt at being "AI guardrails" is over.
~90% of HN commenters who mentioned Pocket in the last decade or so have been complaining about Mozilla's wasted effort on Pocket and how no one asked for it and how it was just another Mozilla "scam" and now that it's being removed, ~90% of the comments are "sad" and "I used it a lot."
This is a perfectly reasonable distribution once you consider that only a small fraction of people who really care about something are motivated enough to comment about it.
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.
This.
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.
The two opinions aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
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 used and enjoyed Pocket, but never paid a dime for it
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.)
I went out of my way to disable it in about:config in the 3 different booleans I needed to do that. But dancing on the grave of something is meh.
Yay!
One less thing to disable and hide on every new installation is a win.
Check out LibreWolf and see if its defaults come closer to what you want. For me, it's better. I still have to modify a few settings, but not nearly as many as with vanilla Firefox.
that's what I thought. I was against the integration and had to make efforts ever since that inappropriate cash-grab. Glad to see it's dead.
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.
There's no money in being a good browser and a minority will scream at any attempt for Mozilla to make money other than donations.
Sad to see Pocket shutting down. For anyone seeking alternatives, I've been working on Linkwarden[1], an open-source bookmark manager that hit HN's front page twice[2][3]. Plenty of other great alternatives out there too, such as Raindrop (not fully open-source), Karakeep, and Wallabag.
Also, there's an official Linkwarden mobile app in development, aiming to support most (if not all) of Pocket's key features :)
[1]: https://linkwarden.app
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942308
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856801
wow, i did not see this coming!
/s
But i think (hope) this is a good thing. Mozilla has been too distracted and needs to get their head in the game.
This is a good decision, Mitchell Baker has a familly to feed after all.
/s
Are they going to refund money to Premium users who recently subscribed or renewed?
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."
That is covered in the link.