Most "read it later" services save web pages on their servers, which cannot preserve paywalls, ad-free content, pages that require login or registration, and pages on a local network.
Sharing why I decided to develop my own "read it later" software.
1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether, I have accumulated thousands of them.
2. On my computer, I can preview them one by one, but I cannot search through them. So, I developed a Node.js service that parses web pages locally and stores them in an SQLite FTS for full-text search. I deployed the service using Docker on my NAS.
3. To enhance my learning experience, I also developed an annotation feature that allows me to make notes and annotations directly on the offline HTML. For good articles, I save them to read slowly over time.
4. Gradually, the app gained some users. Since they were not familiar with Docker, I wrapped it with Electron and developed a standalone desktop version. The desktop version and Docker version use CRDT for peer-to-peer synchronization.
5. Some users provided feedback that it was inconvenient to annotate after saving, so I developed an open-source browser extension. Users can now annotate web pages directly in the browser, and the annotations and snapshots are saved automatically. When visiting the page again in the future, previous annotations can be restored.
Yesterday I was on a flight so I downloaded some paywalled articles on my phone using safari reading list. Once we took off and I lost connectivity I opened the article and saw - the paywall page. I tried looking for mobile read later apps that save offline and save what I saw not what their servers see, but not much luck.
I’ve my own app which can save pages as I saw them and create reader views out of them, but no offline access yet. This is a pretty niche use case but I feel these days more and more decent writing is behind paywalls (Substack and newsletters) so the current read it later apps are losing usefulness and they’re all frozen on features.
Honestly Apple just in general stops working the moment you lose internet connection and it sucks. The whole ecosystem seems to assume you always have internet.
That’s really rough. Instapaper (free version) and GoodLinks ($5) both work perfectly for me without internet access. Haven’t tried substacks in GoodLinks, but Instapaper grabs them without issue.
Nice to hear about hamsterbase, will check it out.
I should mention, archive search in Instapaper doesn’t work without a premium subscription, but works fine for the 500 articles you can keep offline on your device.
"Thank you for your reminder. May I ask if you are accessing the website on your mobile phone? The pricing page is located at the top of the official website for desktop version. If you are using the mobile version, you will need to click on the hamburger button.
I have updated the wording to: “Free during the beta period, Provide Believer plan, one-time purchase (60$) with lifetime updates.”
Ha, I love the 'Believer plan', it's much more honest than most of the vaporware sellers out there (errm... kickstarters) and to outdo them you have at least released.
Kudos. I'll consider becoming a believer, since the 'scrapbook' extension got murdered by FF leaving me with years of inaccessible notes I've been looking for a replacement, even if not perfect it will definitely have to be based on open standards and open source.
Uh, yes, sorry. I also use a dark theme extension that renders the menu icon almost invisible (maybe try to view the page with some of them, in high enough contrast ratio this shouldn't happen). I thought the footer had all the links, so maybe that should be extended - stating the price on multiple places does not seem necessary otherwise.
Price seems to be reasonable, good luck with your project!
You can try the desktop version first, and then consider buying it after the mobile version is released. Until iOS and Android are developed, there will be no charge.
Currently hamsterbase provides rss subscription export, you can take any cell phone rss client subscription.
See https://getupnext.com/, it can save many paywalled articles and dejunk quite a few pages. Their infrastructure for “read it later” is great and they told me they are working on adding a recommender to it to make it a more complete solution.
My understanding is that Readwise uses the HTML you're seeing on your browser to make the copy and this works with paywalls better than most services I've tried. The downside is you need to give their desktop browser plugin more permissions than is ideal and this doesn't work when saving from mobile.
Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces for their respective purposes. Pocket isn’t really trying to be both things, and it seems odd to fault it for not being good at what it isn’t designed to do.
With the exception of syncing the list between devices (a feature I personally can't imagine myself needing or wanting, though I can definitely see why others would), these things are basically what tabs are for. You open things up in tabs to read them later, and you can also search tabs (a feature supported by firefox, at least, not sure about other browsers) and categorize them (their order and grouping into separate windows). Tabs also have the benefit of being extremely convenient, whereas there's a whole lot more friction involved in using any other option, like bookmarks, or things like pocket.
Browsers these days have settings which automatically unload tabs to make sure you don't run out of RAM. I personally don't run into issues with 16GB of RAM, so I don't have those settings enabled.
> and never turn off your computer nor close your browser. I like being able to read my bookmarks a week, or even a month later.
Browsers allow persisting the set of windows and tabs you have open across sessions, so this isn't an issue. I probably have a few hundred tabs open at any given moment across a few subject-specific windows, some of those tabs several months old, and I close my browser and shut down my computer all the time. Firefox simply restores the windows and tabs when I open it, so it all works out just fine.
One is a queue. Another is a directory. Pocket articles are more conceptually one-and-done. I don't have time to read this now, so I put on the queue to read tomorrow morning. Not, I found this cool article I plan to reread many times over several years.
Very much agree that Pocket has gotten worse as I've used it over the years. It's so bad I've mostly moved to the much better Readwise (https://readwise.io/). I'd be fully over if they actually supported a decent export (see below). It's sad because I'm probably in the 99th percentile of Pocket users in terms of usage and am happily paying them for Premium.
I can't remember a significant improvement to Pocket in 2 years. Meanwhile, here's a non-exhaustive list of major, basic features that don't work:
-Searching my own archive. This works maybe 75% of the time on articles I am 100% sure are in there.
-Having a "permanent copy" of articles. This is Pocket's version of "full self driving," in that it doesn't mean what you think it means.
-The ability to do any sort of advanced search. Pocket's web app has had a regression for exact match searching or multiple word searching for the longest time. I've raised numerous tickets with support and never get any meaningful responses.
-Reliability of text to speech. There have been weeks-long spells where the better TTS voices just don't work.
-Highlight exports or really any decent API interactions.
I'm guessing that this software is just on life support now. I'd love to hear from someone actually at Mozilla on what's happening with this software. What's been the headcount on this project?
Anyway, anyone on Hacker News is almost certainly served better by Readwise. Matter also looked promising but they didn't have an Android app so I never bought in.
Ditto. Recently moved from Pocket to Readwise and it's so much better. Readwise also supports spaced repetition for your highlights. Pocket could have been so much more. It could have surface articles I'd like using a Spotify style algorithm, it could have been so amazing, but Mozilla have killed it. I don't understand how they're so incompetent.
Saving offline copies simply… doesn’t work. It’s stuck at “preparing” perpetually, every time. That’s with me having a Premium subscription!
Search being poor is one thing, but at least it sometimes works. Offline saving is one of the flagship features, and it doesn’t work, and hasn’t in probably two years.
By the way, I'm curious if there are any Pocket communities anywhere. Readwise, for instance, has an active Discord. I haven't been able to find anything for Pocket, which is perhaps telling.
I'd gone poking around on The Site That Is On Strike recently and discovered that both /r/pocket and /r/getpocket are either on strike or had been closed by admins, it's not clear which.
That said, yes, curiously little community around Pocket.
The Pocket thing was when I started to feel Mozilla lost their way. For a while I tried to maintain a patch that completely removed it. But, that's not fun.
The Idea of Pocket is great - seems everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base. And the archival feature was/is cool (I added the same to my own PKB).
And Pocket for organizing, messy like the article says. I do tagging and SQLite FTS - works a treat.
Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected.
Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction.
My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+ public GitHub repositories for code and issue notes, 100+ private repositories for private code and private issue notes, a Pocket account with 8700 items in it, plus the contents of my 15+ year old Dropbox folder structure, an old Evernote dump and a continually growing S3 bucket of larger things.
You certainly don’t need - I know and have worked with many successful people who don’t have any sort of meaningful (beyond grocery list type) notes or externally-stored knowledge of any kind.
This feels like a comment without substance and in a way, it is. But I think it’s important to push back on this idea that if you aren’t managing a Second Brain while you’re GTD’ing a side project and Tools for Thought-ing your way through the western canon you’re wasting your life.
I don't usually need to scan back more than a few days, but one book lasts several months. You can use it standing up, e.g. in a SCRUM. It's resistant to having a mug of coffee spilled over it. It never crashes, and it doesn't need RAID or backups. You can attach post-its to the pages. You can use a stack of 4-5 of them as a monitor stand.
Downsides: you can't paste screencaps into it. And there's no search function.
Yes, it's a glorified grocery list. But it works better for me than any electronic solution.
I met plenty of productive people who do so with hardback notebooks and a pencil, you are good. Other thing I saw is once they are done with it they glue a paper on the cover and notedown some things and throw the notebook in a big plastic box for archival. Recently finished notebooks tend to find some time living in their desks before going into the box.
i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life.
otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time.
that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced) hopes of trapping a captive audience; no good.
Open standards, open formats, and a revenue stream that isn't user-hostile -- then i'm in.
Agree with the plainest-of-plain-text approach. For me, the more structured the note system, the less it is used. I have a simple script called `n` that operates on a `notes.txt` on my NAS. If given arguments, it appends a timestamp and the arguments (verbatim) to the notes file. This serves as a super quick way to jot something down or log an action (`n determined Krylon adheres best for project X`, `n timestamp placeholder for server X reboot`). Alternatively, calling it with no arguments appends a timestamp and opens vim in insert mode at the bottom of the file. Finally, I have an alias `nt` to open `less` at the bottom of the notes file, for quick review (`alias nt=less +G ~/share/notes.txt`).
The main script is:
~$ cat share/bin/n
#! /usr/bin/env bash
cd $HOME/share # or wherever you want to put your notes
echo >> notes.txt
echo -n '# ' >> notes.txt
date '+%a %d %b %Y %T %Z' | tr -d "\n" >> notes.txt
echo ' #' >> notes.txt
if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then
echo $@ >> notes.txt
tail notes.txt
else
vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt # or nano: nano -R +-1 notes.txt
fi
This script is accessible from all my personal machines as well as appropriate work machines. It works well enough. I've devised a small system of tags and keywords, but that part is not particularly interesting. I just put the keywords at the beginning of a line and search for them with /^thekeyword/.
More structured notes go into dokuwiki or just a LibreOffice file in the project folder.
All this is almost guaranteed to be readable in 20 years. The LibreOffice files may be at more risk, but at least there is more than one tool available to read them.
Do you look back over these notes and find them useful? Perhaps it's my ADD or the
nature of the software products I create, but for the past 20 years of my career, I've never kept significant notes and never found myself missing them. I'm wondering if there's something I don't know that I don't know here.
I refer to mine constantly. Just one example: I wrote this one a few days ago and I've already referred back to it for four separate projects in the past 48 hours: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject
Quickly check the last note to remember what I was doing? Often. Search through? Rarely, maybe once a month. The times I do though it's really helpful. I realized I was forgetting lots of semi important things that had no default place to write down.
This frequency informed the design, in fact. Easy to write, easy to read the last couple entries, moderate difficulty in finding older entries (in exchange for lower cost of making individual notes).
I think for me this is why it's so important for the system to be almost zero effort, else I'll just kinda stop using it. Just having an ubiquitous default place to dump something out of my brain helps.
Of note. A very slightly modified version of this runs on an ancient Thinkpad in my bedroom for diary/mental health reasons. I find the separation helpful. Those I almost never ever read, but I think that's the point of those.
Edit: at work I didn't really use this system, it's mostly for my own life. At work I used the ticket tracker, wikis, and calendar. I found that taking personal notes at work was best substituted by making actual documents that my team could find and use. There were much fewer uncategorized tasks at work.
This is cool. I do something similar but with an IRC server that I run and expose over wireguard.
I have a channel where my various IOT devices tell me stuff, a channel where my algorithmic trading bot notifies me, and a reminders channel that basically serves as an append-only, always-synched memopad.
The only revenue stream that isn’t user-hostile is subscriptions. And people generally hate that: imo, the web ended up ad-supported because users did not want to pay every website they used directly and it remains ad-supported because users continue to reject the viable alternatives (subscriptions, services like Blendle, some micropayment scheme).
Yeah, subscriptions is tough for this because it needs to be a solution which lasts a lifetime - it's hard to confidently subscribe to something that I may end up paying for decades, especially if it may turn out not to be the right solution in the long-run.
I think some combination of a subscription and source escrow would be ideal here: if the service goes under, some third-party releases the source to subscribed customers.
I'm not the op but posted about my own text system. In short, I never used images in my notes even when adding them was easy, so I saved myself the trouble of having to deal with rich document formats. With the goal of portability and tool agnosticism in mind, I believe a plain text file is better for me. Everything can break or be replaced, yet I'll be able to continue my work habits using nothing more than notepad or even EDIT.EXE. I'm reasonably confident markdown or html will be readable for a long time, but I value ultra simplicity here. I think ultimately it's a matter of personal taste.
When I produce images, it's nearly always in the context of a project, which has a wiki or other system. But that's outside of what I'd personally call "notes".
Markdown and html can display local images. The only tricky thing is if you want to place images in separate folders and how you maintain that structure over time.
I believe that charts and diagrams convey a lot of information that cannot be easily reproduced with raw text. I guess it ultimately depends on the topic you are reviewing.
Pocket could have been the 'Memex', but they decided to do it server side, possibly as a way to get people to start using Mozilla/FireFox accounts. If it had been local with an email backend (IMAP or so) that would have been great.
My six-year-old rant still mostly applies (there've been some improvements to tag editing, and there's now in-article search for the Android app), but Pocket still massively underdelivers, increasingly as one relies on it more.
Most recently, I found I had to revert to a six-month-old version of the app in order to have both paginated navigation and to be able to open the "web view" in app ... which is where occasionally useful things such as tag editors live. Thread here: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/110680672833582286>
That said ... I've largely given up on Pocket delivering what I would like to see, and if I can steer discussion here, I'd really like to know what Android-specific and/or e-ink tablet tools people have for managing large article repositories on device.
I'm familiar with Zotero and Calibre, though both are desktop only, as well as Wallabag.
Mendelay is a no-op given Elsevere's ownership.
Anything I don't yet know of?
My long-standing dream is to create KFC, Krell Functional Context, a document management tool that would include webfs and docfs components, inspired somewhat by Plan9OS and its P9.
> I'm familiar with Zotero and Calibre, though both are desktop only
There's a third-party Zotero client for Android named "Zoo for Zotero" that has worked well for me: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mickstarif.... However, I usually use it to read academic papers on my phone that I have already added to my library using my computer. I tried adding something new to my Zotero library on my phone as I was typing this comment, and sadly the interface seems a little clumsy: I can add papers to a collection but not a subcollection
I’m using Pocket for reading articles on eink in spare time - I use Kobo Forma - it has 8” screen and is lightweight and has a decent battery life (unlike newer Kobo Sage). Not all articles are saved though.
I used to do a trick with Remarkable 2/kobo - exporting webpage on iPhone into Dropbox as pdf - resulting pdf is formatted for a small screen
For pdfs and web reading I use Boox Onyx Air - with 10.3” screen and full android browsing experience…
But I need to sit and hold larger screens with two arms, while with Kobo Forma I can hold in one hand while layout down.
Boox recently released Page - 7.8” lightweight android ereader, but I’m not sure that android device would hold battery as good as Kobo Forma.
Onyx BOOX Max Lumi here, 13'3 inches of 2200x1650 pixel, 220 dpi, 16 greyscale goodness. The device is quite frankly fantastic, despite a somewhat anemic (for my purposes) onboard storage of 64 GB (doubled in the follow-in Max Lumi 2). (I'm perennially well above 90% utilised, though a good chunk of that are podcasts.) I've written about that at length in other HN comments, search should turn those up for anyone interested. Yes, it's huge, but it means (almost) never having to pan-and-zoom within scientific or scanned-in magazine articles.
Smaller devices can work, though 8" is probably the smallest I'd consider for serious reading.
My experience with Onyx is that when used just for e-books the battery life is excellent. Once you start web surfing or playing podcasts, battery starts getting chewed pretty quickly, though a charge still lasts most of a day. My preferred web browser (Einkbro) easily consumes 10x the power of Neoreader (Onyx's ebook reader software).
I'm increasingly finding the Web just ... generally less interesting (though of course it is compelling to a painful degree), and have amassed a large library of books and articles mostly in PDF, ePub, DVJU, and a smattering of other formats. Organising those usefully is the 2nd 90% of my content-management frustration. Writing is the 3rd 90%. Oddly enough, Termux provides a number of tools there that I find useful, including a healthy chunk of the libpoppler PDF tools, though that really needs an external keyboard (which I have, it's still somewhat awkward to use).
What I really wish Pocket would do is:
- Render Web-based articles in a fixed-layout, paginated, comfortably-margined (sides AND top/bottom) layout, with e-book-reader style touch-based page turns. (Whatever your favourite ebook reader does, that's what I'm talking about, Neoreader is quite good, I've also used FBReader and Pocketbook, and looked at the Koboreader software a bit.)
- Let me tag, highlight, and annotate those to my heart's content.
- Let me SEARCH the damned archive, by metadata and full text.
- Let me edit metadata where automated tools (or poor original creation) have fouled things up.
- Let me export lists of references with relevant metadata: title, author, URL, dates, etc.
I've adopted a number of practices to make up for holes in Pocket's offerings.
- I started tagging items with a "filed: <datespec>" tag a couple of years ago. I'd really like for that to be a built-in feature, and for search by time-period to be A Thing: past day / week / month / year, as well as spans. With my tags and an exported dataset I can at least build my own tools to do that.
- I've got a handful of projects that I'll tag a piece with if it pertains to that, so "project: <projectname>" Given the 25-character tag limitation, "proj:" would probably be a better prefix.
- Similar concepts for "task: <stuff>" and "error: <description>", where tasks are specific to-do type things (e.g., "hn" for "post to Hacker News"), or "print" for make a hardcopy printout. "share: <email-or-name>" could also be reminders to ping somebody with an article.
- "BOTI" is "best of the interval", the notion being that this is an exceptionally good item. More recently I've been relying on Einkbro's "save as ePub" feature which enables saving multiple articles, over time, to a single document. So you can build up a book of articles. (One thing I've realised from doing that is just how much reading I put on my plate. A small sampling of articles from the current year already runs to ~400 pages as an ePub.)
- I've got a notation for indicating my assessed article quality, on a scale of 0 to (for now) 5, with higher being better. 0 indicates content that makes you dumber (usually archived as examples of bogosity or negative propaganda). 1 merely establishes a basic fact, 2 gives some detail, 3 is a high-quality article, 4 exemplary article or a good book, 5 effectively establishes a new field or is otherwise a definitive reference (say: Shannon's articles on information theory). I try very hard to not over-rate content, and one of my projects is downrating a bunch of stuff I'd initially ranked too high.
I was considered 13” Onyx Boox Lumi Max, and still do, but couldn’t justify as I don’t do that much organized reading.
Onyx made annoying product decision to not include microSD to expensive 10 and 13 inch models, while still keeping it on 8” Leaf2 and Page.
Are you using written notes while reading on your Lumi Max or typing only?
With such reading system I would look into Obsidian/Notion/Readwise/Logseq/Tana running on Lumi Max - at least Obsidian and Logseq has android apps. Note that Logseq is local first system - it stores files on your disk then the option to sync on your server for free or their paid sync service.
The BOOX devices do come with an OTG port, and it's possible to attach a MicroSD card via that, though the arrangement is somewhat perilous (risking physical damage to the card, OTG attachment, and port) and not ideal.
I too would have preferred an integrated MicroSD slot. Current cards are available in 1TB+ sizes, which should satisfy even my prodigious appetite.
I do make use of handwritten notes as well, both in documents (Neoreader) and in the notetaking app. I've found that far more useful than I'd anticipated, though searching notes is of course challenging.
Thanks for the hint about einkbro saving articles to ePub, I’ll give it a try.
Does saving to ePub feature works for paywalled content? Does it save ads too?
Save to ePub from sites such as Archive Today works fine ;-) I've not specifically tried paywalled sites, but so long as you have a subscription I don't see why not.
With two layers of adblock (local LAN, IP-based, adblock on EinkBro itself), I see no ads in saved content, and very rarely in full Web view either. AFAIU it filters the source article through Readability.js, so the main article is what's saved, not navigation, asides, etc.
Given that enshittification is a power play by a dominant monopoly, and Pocket really doesn't seem to have any such power, I'd argu that it's not that. Plain old incompetence and/or failure to articulate product-market fit seems far more likely.
Specifically as regards Pocket, there seem to be both a constant war against those using the tool, and/or who are inflicted with it (it's packaged/bundled with Firefox these days), neither of which do much to engender good relations.
There's also what I see as a terribly misguided goal of trying to be a content recommendation engine, when I suspect that the problem most of us face isn't not having sufficient gobs of content shoveled at our faces, but in trying to make sense of that which we have acquired.
Tools such as workflows, date-based tagging, multi-tag search (being able to search, say "german" and "comedy", rather than "german" and "comedy" separately --- basic AND logic), date-stamping articles (when they were input, when they were read, when they were highlighted / forwarded), the ability to compile article lists to send via email, metadata exports, the ability to directly edit metadata (automated tools often get the basics wrong: title, author, date, etc.). Export of articles to a durable document format --- saving a single article to a PDF or ePub document, or multiple documents, etc., etc.
I've discussed most of this at length with Pocket's support for years, or rather, had some years ago and largely gave up the effort when there seemed to be no discernible movement in directions I'd encouraged.
I’ve tried all the third party services for archiving interesting things over the years but nothing beats saving everything to your local filesystem using [SingleFile](https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile) and using a full-text search frontend over the directory (something like Houdahspot, for example).
SingleFile even has an iOS extension (and easySearch is very nice for iOS search - although not quite as nice as a desktop experience, owing to iOS limitations).
Some time ago I decided to write my own program to manage my links [1].
I don't want to sign up anywhere. I don't want algorithms and suggestions. My app is on LAN network. I can add links, download data, search, add tags, highlight.
Some things do not work. It is work in progress. I am not a web dev so it is bare bones. I do not use JavaScript, as I hate it. It uses Django and celery.
Once a day I make my bookmarks public [2].
I am still learning. I just wanted to say you do not have to rely on anything to host a link aggregation software.
Being a silly person, my method of tagging things to archive and read later is stupid simple:
I copy/paste/append the url to a text file, links.txt, along with a cut&paste of what its about.
I can have multiples of those files. Search them with grep, whatever.
I abandoned bookmarking tools long ago, because they reinvented (poorly) things like search, backups, etc., besides probably selling my bookmarks to some data aggregator.
FWIW, for this use case of creating curated sets of web pages, I find that Pinboard (https://pinboard.in) works really well for this case. When researching a project I'll tag pages with the project id and other relevant tags I'm using (like "sdr" or "camping-gear") and then the search function can instantly give me the list of pages I was looking at. There was a greasemonkey script that would take the search results page of Pinboard and open all the links in tabs in a new window but I have lost track of that at the moment.
Saving this for later on Pocket, hopefully it won't get lost in my ever growing list of links that I will get to categorize and maybe even read some day.
Starting out with Pocket some years ago, I almost immediately learned to not rely on its reader feature. I haven’t used it since. It makes a hash out of basically everything, with image captions presented as normal body text, code snippets missing (this is a big one), images missing, quotes missing etc.
Perhaps the respective article authors didn’t use html markup semantically correct, so a naive reader runs into trouble. But if such a Reader is part of your core business proposal and you are, by now, Mozilla, one would hope articles didn’t get butchered in reader view.
Pocket sucks. I used it to save articles to read them offline later. About half of the articles would not load offline for a reason or another. Sometimes they would download and I would look at them on my iPad, then they would be grayed out the second I turned WiFi off. A bunch of others would only load in web view, but without images.
I have no idea of how a product can be so unreliable at its main job for so long. Instapaper has been rock solid so far.
A lot of things are like this. Like the Microsoft Edge developers apparently tested the case where you open dozens of tabs, but I often have open hundreds of tabs, all neatly stored in tab groups. Hey, I thought the unification of the tabs and bookmarks concept was cool! Until I tried it. It mostly works, until you try to rearrange the tabs, and then the scrollbar just jumps a random distance after a 500ms delay. Useless.
I decided to take a look at the redesigned mobile app after some time not using it. Can't believe how much worse it got.
I don't appreciate their move towards "social" feed sure, but the reader has genuinely gotten worse. I remember that it used to have the options to adjust:
- Line Height
- Page Width
- Text Alignment
- Fonts beyond the defaults (for paid subscribers, which I am one).
In the new app, it was all gone. Yet, I'm still paying the same premium price for it. The web app still has those perks, but it's probably because there hasn't been any update to it for the past 2 years or so.
I haven't had any use for the app for some years now. Like what many say in this thread, it's not that hard to build a system that replaces it well enough. You just need to make it scrape links, turn them to markdown (personal preference), and index the entire content for FTS in SQLite.
Thanks to the OP for reminding me to cancel my subscription. Now I just need to find a way to export my huge pocket archive before the subscription renews.
> The fact that I can't even say, not even approximately, how much material I've archived, is a profound signifier of the design failures and lack of consideration of use-cases. The folks at Pocket seem to have given absolutely no thought to how people might use their product, or benefit by self-directed use. (And it's not as if they've not heard: I've shared this complaint with them multiple times over the past two years.)
This sounds like the sort of thing the Pocket engineer[s] probably understand and desire, but it doesn't fit the vision of some designer who vetoes it and tells the engineer[s] they don't know anything about design and that users don't want to be cluttered with extraneous information and features.
Wrong tool for the job. If you want to do serious research and archival, use something like DevonThink. I have 20 GB+ worth of stuff there (millions of items including 10 year email history) and it still does full-text search in under 500ms.
I have an information triage process that ends with DEVONThink. I save bookmarks to drafts app, go through them when I have time. And if they are worth it, I save then in DEVONThink where I go through and mark them up.
I wonder if it wouldnt make more sense to just train a Commentator Neural Net with the pages you collect. It then can "remind" you of similar pages you have seen before, directly in the page, with little floating comments like "..skip..." "..contradicts.. http:/link/x/y/z " "..actual paper link.." "..paper is p-hacked shovelware.." "..authors reputation.."
It could be trained to become your personal pre-reading assistant, similar to information accumulators and pre-evaluators in governments agencies or company hqs.
Pinboard.in has been the perfect long term bookmark solution for me. It has simple tagging, the site is clean and easy to read, search is excellent. Have gladly paid year over year the 22 bucks for the full shebang.
Using pocket on its own is definitely not the way to go. I've got a rather convoluted setup chaining together different apps.
Pocket is my default save - anything that looks remotely interesting gets sent there for me to browser at my leisure.
If something I read looks like I'll want to revisit it, and I save the page to zotero, which is where most of the note-taking, tagging, and organisation takes place.
Lastly I export my notes to LogSeq, which has zotero integration, so they can form part of my knowledge graph.
Pocket could have been much more; it should be something between [omnivore.app](https://omnivore.app/) and Evernote's scrap-booking feature and then it would be immensely useful and bring people to Firefox. In its current form, it's a fancy bookmark maker that I don't ever use.
My pocket subscription renewal is coming up. After 8-10years of using pocket, I'll not be renewing it anymore. It was a decent product that just got worse over time and I just don't see them improving it anymore. Pinboard was a decent alternative but now that's not an option anymore.
I'll be checking out the third newer option, raindrop I think.
Wallabag the server is ok, not amazing at rendering webpages to be readable, and article thumbnail view needs work.
The browser plugins are the nightmare (Chrome comes to mind) You need to manually generate an API key and configure it in the browser. The process is very confusing, and too much work to configure on multiple machines with multiple browsers. The plug-ins are written by different developers, all open source as a hobby, so I while I think the effort is admirable and I hope it continues, it is still a beta experience.
Kobo can potentially fix it, but the short notice and breaking important functionality in one of their revenue generating products/services adds to my pessimism about Mozilla’s leadership, which is already very pessimistic.
I have a tiny service I put on Vercel that takes a bookmarklet I click on any page, get the URL, scrape the content I send to it through my browser, then save that to Airtable.
I just realized I have like 12,000+ links I've saved (many of them from HN over the years), and Airtable is great for tagging, searching, etc!
Can you share the service? Or share how you scrape the content? There's https://readability-bot.vercel.app that is based on Firefox's reader mode, but it doesn't work very well.
It extracts the page's title, the url, and even prompts you to give it some tags if you need some.
You still need to host your own webhook to save it, but that too should be straightforward. Just use firefox's readability.js to strip the bloat elements and save it in your database. You could save it into Airtable like what OP's been doing, or even save it as a file in your cloud storage.
> It takes me 45 seconds just to scroll from the top of the list to the end on the Android app.
There's the problem with over classification. Having had the same problem, I've reduced the tags to around 10 which is also a bit too much. Sometimes I think 3 should be enough: low, medium and high priority.
I've long had issues on Android where lists that should effectively be infinite scrolls instead have a cache of maybe 20 items and they just repeat as you scroll.
FWIW, for my current methodology, I capture the text - often from a Tranquility Reader version of the page - and then apply a macro in Notepad++ that removes 90% of the remaining junk. Then save it to a text file.
Instead of pocket I just have a personal discord server where I organize all the neat links that I find online, I write a short intro or header and some keywords
Far easier to search and more instantly readable than pocket is
One fallback I've considered in all seriousness is simply an email address to which I submit articles, and access through a full-featured email tool such as mutt.
The main challenge there is that it's difficult to reorganise information once it's captured, but search tools, the ability to reply to threads, and the automatic capture of basic metadata (sender, subject, date) are useful.
Mutt specifically has a highly robust threading algorithm. I'm not sure what happens if this becomes rentrant, that is, a given child node might have multiple parents from different threads. Mutt as given presumes that any given parent reference (indicated through headers) is either parent to, or a child of, other referenced emails. I'm picturing a web rather than a tree.
Email is also extensible with regard to headers, and with mutt it's trivial to write hooks and tools to work with those.
And once email is stored in a standard format (say, maildir), there are other tools such as mh which can operate on the corpus at the shell level.
I used to use Pocket. Like OP I had an extensive collection and experimented most of the described issues.
For me the solution was to migrate to DEVONthink. It supports WebArchives for saving whole pages but also a few other formats that can preserve only content. Its search is great. It also has an iOS app. It’s web clip browser extension can save the page as you see it (most of the time) so can save pages behind a paywall or login.
I don’t think there are apps for other platforms so probably not a solution for the OP.
Web clipper works great on a desktop web browser and saves content, but this uses a browser plug-in and I can’t think of a practical way to save an article on a mobile device (phone or ipad). Also, pages are converted to Markdown, which is usually helpful, but rendering can be different and I recall running into occasional issues.
Now for reading, the mobile app at the time (I think still true) renders in Markdown, not a weblike view, so the reading experience wasn’t great (no inline pictures, diagrams). However, for pulling content it worked very well.
What works for me is Zotero. It is the best to capture paywalled content (at least in desktop), and I can still capture and read things on mobile. I do use Pocket mainly to sync with my ereader.
Sharing why I decided to develop my own "read it later" software.
1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether, I have accumulated thousands of them.
2. On my computer, I can preview them one by one, but I cannot search through them. So, I developed a Node.js service that parses web pages locally and stores them in an SQLite FTS for full-text search. I deployed the service using Docker on my NAS.
3. To enhance my learning experience, I also developed an annotation feature that allows me to make notes and annotations directly on the offline HTML. For good articles, I save them to read slowly over time.
4. Gradually, the app gained some users. Since they were not familiar with Docker, I wrapped it with Electron and developed a standalone desktop version. The desktop version and Docker version use CRDT for peer-to-peer synchronization.
5. Some users provided feedback that it was inconvenient to annotate after saving, so I developed an open-source browser extension. Users can now annotate web pages directly in the browser, and the annotations and snapshots are saved automatically. When visiting the page again in the future, previous annotations can be restored.