If anyone is interested into self-hosting their bookmarks service so that they don't suffer this again. Here is a list of interesting open source projects that provides that
Happy user of Linkding here (wish it had a different name that wasn't one syllable away from LinkedIn).
Linkding: I self-host and the developer has been very receptive and open minded about feature requests.
Pinboard: I moved after Maciej asked existing subscribers for donations so he could hire somebody to keep it running and then... didn't. I'm not saying he used that money to do some travelling, but it certainly looked that way to me.
I'm 99% sure your comment was written by AI. Do I have any proof? No. Does it matter if the content is relevant? No. Should I have just voted instead of accusing someone? Yes.
> No. Does it matter if the content is relevant? No.
I think noting the prevalence of AI generated content masquerading as human is also relevant and important to point out.
If I want relevant content written by AI, then I will talk to an AI, not go to a forum. AI generated comments should be tagged as such.
For what it's worth, the user edited their comment after I posted so that it no longer appears to be written by AI. The original had all the signs of coming straight out of a ChatGPT prompt (but no longer does). You may have missed the comment before the edit, but it was very obvious.
I've seen it post edit it seems. It would be nice if HN marked that... But yeah, if it's good quality and I can't tell the difference from a human writing it, I'm cool with it - because at that point it's just random accusations that are going to be wrong a lot of the time.
I asked him for my full archive download in October 2022, and having heard nothing back I wound up paying him another $39 to keep my archive from being deleted while I tried to get his attention.
I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January".
I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.
Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.
Yup also happened to me in 2018. I never received a download link for my archive. My support email was never answered and my archive expired and was deleted.
At one time he asked all existing subscribers for donations to enable him to pay a Romanian programmer to maintain the site. People paid and then he used the money for something else other than employing somebody to maintain the site. Not cool. Ref: https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/161007608301301350...
Yeah he's just making enough money that he doesn't care anymore. He is aware of how many people are confused about the lack of support and has commented about it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31186755.
I have requested my full archive download a couple of times over the last year and haven't been able to get it, which stinks. I keep trying to figure out a migration plan, but it seems daunting, especially with so many archived bookmarks. I love the service and want to keep using it, but the inability to get a backup archive makes me nervous.
Yep, stopped working for me years ago. Had to contact The Guy personally every single time, because my archive grew to 20GB. He’s not responsive for years tho :(
Raindrop is not a new app. I've been using it for about five years now.
It's a solo developer project by one guy in Kazakhstan, which makes it all the more impressive. It has a great browser extension, a great desktop app (Electron-based, but very well done), and a great iOS mobile app (no idea about Android). It's also been under active development since I started using it.
One of its best features is its app, which allows you to browse your bookmarks in a split pane.
I've only checked out the AI feature now, since you mentioned it. I'm not a fan of pointless AI features that get added to apps, but this one is actually useful! It suggests places your bookmarks should be moved to. I had a bunch of stuff in an "Unsorted" folder, and it actually made really accurate suggestions for where they should be moved, and it also suggested moving some stuff I had miscategorized or where I had a more specific folder it could be in.
Honestly that's a rare good use case for AI: low stakes, passes through a human before anything actually happens, and is about ambiguos categorization based on human language.
I migrated from pinboard to raindrop this year, can confirm.
I was on Pinboard's lifetime plan. No subscription, just a single payment of $15 back who knows when. A few years ago I was asked if I wouldn't rather pay $5 per month instead, and declined. I wonder if all the outages and throttling were a result of underestimating the running costs.
Regardless, service quality had declined to such levels that I switched to raindrop this year. Ironically, raindrop is free to use, and may run into the same issue eventually.
I got the same e-mail and also declined to move off the lifetime plan. I would have considered it to support the site but I could see where the owner's attention was going to be focused. Politics is a hell of a drug.
I also migrated from Pinboard to Raindrop and can confirm it's a great service, is updated regularly and while I've generally not received quick responses to questions or feedback, I do eventually. It's also worth mentioning that at least for iOS and MacOS, it has nice integrations that work well, which I could never say about Pinboard.
I got Anybox[0] with the lifetime subscription (40$) and have been happy with it (Only for Apple devices unfortunately)
I can choose to automatically download a web archive when I bookmark. Also has a trial version. Can be a bit overwhelming to set things up. But works seamlessly once done.
Homebuilt tool. Started when the Pocket BS in FF happened, just kept playing with it. It's a PWA/Share Target on mobile and an extension in my browser.
I was a previous Pinboard customer. I've since moved to Linkding[0], a self-hosted solution, and highly recommend it. It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard but gives me much more confidence about the longevity of my bookmarks.
Internally, perhaps, but it doesn't have external feature parity when it comes to, e.g., being able to automagically import things using IFTTT.
(Yes, I could probably lash up a webhook feeding into linkding but IFTTT's webhook support still isn't great but I'm already 20 projects behind on my personal list and redoing all my IFTTT recipes that talk to Pinboard isn't going to be a priority.)
Linkding is definitely worth a look though as backup.
It really depends on your needs. I use Pinboard on many different browsers and devices and I'm not really interested in running my own service. I'll happily pay for the full text archiving but I acknowledge it is not perfect. I have come to the conclusion if you want to retain full text copies of your bookmarks, you need to download the pages yourself. I have been using SingleFile extension but there is also a CLI available.
What have you been using for search? The CLI app? What is your download workflow like? Is there an automated way to download a bunch of links, say pulled in from an API?
I don't have nearly as sophisticated setup as [Gwern](https://gwern.net/archiving), but they provide an overview of how you might go about it. Right now I manually use the extension on as as needed basis, but I would like to get it to the point where I can point a script at a list of urls and both run SingleFile and also upload to the Wayback Machine
Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of "Don't be a free user" (1) is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it's in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn (2)). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn't sustain itself.
It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to market forces and operational challenges.
Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.
It could also be that maciej has enough paying users that he can afford to coast and be unresponsive, losing some users in the process, in order to do whatever else he's doing these days.
The about page says 30,000 active users; most must be paying since there is no free service it seems (though there used to be way back in the day; I used it myself). If half of those are paying, that's $330K a year. Not bad.
nice screed, but it's hard for me to make sense of it as a paying and satisfied user.
similarly it's hard for me to make sense of "this paid service failed, so it's a proof of a failing concept.", given the sheer amount of successful paid services out there.
I mean.. we would be here all day if we were listing the past failures of free services on the net -- what's the point?
Could success perhaps be a bit more complex than whether or not you charge a monthly fee alone?
my takeaway : running a low/no-staff service is hard, and people will perceive any possible gap in customer service as "in freefall", even though everyone is well aware of the human condition.
Check out Shaarli if you are open to self hosted options.
Like pinboard it feels old but in a good way (aka it is light on resources and has a limited featureset). However, I will say that I do not care to archive pages and just use the wayback machine for dead links instead.
Pinboard is Maciej Ceglowski's only visible source of income but he seems to be having jerkbrain troubles (moving from the open web to Twitter makes those worse, kids, don't do that)
I still use pinboard every week. I also find it very interesting to follow what other people are pinning. There aren't many niche places to follow ONLY the notable links of other hackers.
I barely use it but when I do need to look something up it’s great. But conscious that it’s not super robust, I simply save bookmarks in Zotero now and that works even better on all counts.
I’m frankly impressed by how many people still use Pinboard! Like, when I pin some recent niche news article, Pinboard shows that other tens of people already did the same…
I think I paid $5-10 for this as a one-time fee in December 2010. It was one of the best purchases ever. However, by mid-2022, I noticed issues, downtime, weird errors, etc., so I exported and moved on to raindrop.io after emailing support@pinboard.in and not hearing back.
The most I know about this company is the entertaining way in which he demonstrated that Hacker News polls for "who should we fund?" are going to have the same incentives as ones on Reddit. Good times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270
I thought it was really funny. You can't really ask a crowd where to put your money. They'll operate on their own incentives, not yours. And then get pissed off when you don't play along. The classic principal-agent problem but the agents are a mob.
I switched from Pinboard a year or more ago after using it for many years, mainly because I found the iPhone app and integration (eg share feature, to save bookmarks) to be flaky.
Raindrop has been great - imported seamlessly from Pinboard and the iPhone and Desktop app work well for me.
I too was a refugee from del.icio.us and signed up for ~$11 a year. I also declined the offer to "support" the platform for more $. One thing I DO like is the popular tab, I've found a ton of cool resources there. Just sayin.
Same with me but I chose to switch to the yearly subscription. I basically got ignored just the same.
I use Raindrop.io for now.
Maciej is aware of the outrage, if you can call it that. He seems rather hostile to those angry customers.
My hunch is that he got bored with Pinboard and plans to ignore it until it dies. Or breaks and then he does the minimum viable to get it duct taped again.
I personally like Maciej but just telling it like it is.
I decided to pay for 3 years to give myself enough runway to not think about it, I have 9 months left. So I guess I'm giving up and switching to self hosted.
- Linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
- Linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden
- Servas https://github.com/beromir/Servas
- Grimoire https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire
- Hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder
- LinkAce https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/
- Readeck https://readeck.org/en/
- Shaarli https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli
- Shirori https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori