Pocket migration to Firefox accounts(support.mozilla.org) |
Pocket migration to Firefox accounts(support.mozilla.org) |
Nothing better exists than the heaping turd that we have.
Instead of improving and investing in the pocket product, firefox instead chooses to leverage it to promote their other stuff, at the expense of making pocket's user experience worse.
I feel like every FF related post reminds me that Mozilla has lost their way. What can be done to bring it back?
cutting off the money supply or a complete cleanout of the executive team
I use it extensively to capture a reading list and then trim it occasionally. Any recommendations for alternatives?
Offline web-rendered article views are a must - something pocket can’t do. And their text mode misses quite a few important details when there are equations or illustrations in the content.
... nonsense omitted
What's the point of acquiring something if you don't leverage it to coerce their users into using your other products?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service): > On February 27, 2017, Pocket announced that it had been acquired by Mozilla Corporation, the commercial arm of Firefox's non-profit development group. Mozilla staff stated that Pocket would continue to operate as an independent subsidiary but that it would be leveraged as part of an ongoing "Context Graph" project.
I thought Mozilla was going to be investing in Pocket and giving them the resources to grow, as well as sending them Mozilla's users — a fraction of whom would become premium Pocket subscribers.
But as far as I can tell, there haven't been any notable new features in the last 5 years. In fact, some stuff like the web app have gotten noticeably worse. I used to use Pocket almost daily, but now I use it maybe once every couple months.
In the meantime, if this all sounds like too much but you'd still like self-hosted FFsync, you can run the syncserver docker image standalone and piggyback on the rest of Mozilla's hosted FXA stack.
I'm not certain just how big the gap is for Pocket ATM (I know they've continuously been opening up since acquisition).
EDIT: Just to not be that guy, microservices as this isn't clearly documented anywhere:
* pushbox (mysql)
* fxa-auth-server (redis, 2xmysql, smtp)
* browseridverifier
* syncserver (actually tokenserver+syncstorage, if you're not running the docker image. db of choice)
* fxa-contentserver
* fxa-graphql-api
* fxa-profile-server (mysql)
I played around with the idea of writing a minimal version that cuts out all the fat but even that seems like a monstrous undertaking.
Quite a lot has happened on their GH, though. I don't think the web front-end is there, but it seriously looks like they're getting there?
It's pretty radical just how transparent Mozilla actually is, I think. Here's the start of the mentioned migration https://github.com/mozilla/fxa/issues/10635
The only true answer is "not currently". A "not yet" would be too pessimistic, and "never" is too optimistic. If there's one thing that stands out during the past ~decade of software, it's "things are optional... until they aren't."
Who would have thought you'd need an account to read a newspaper or watch broadcast TV over the internet?
I'm now using the nextcloud bookmarks extension, but it's rather slow, seems unmaintained, most android apps & browser extensions don't work anymore (way worse than pocket, but at least there is no adds)
On the scale of years, products fail, get bought, are unmaintained, become too expensive, etc... An export of your database is always a hassle to manage, and you must hope there will be an importer for the next product that will also fail a few years down the road.
On the other hand, files have always been there and will always be there. Epub is a standard-enough format that will live. The highest piece of complexity is syncthing, which can be easily replaced the day it doesn't work anymore. Bonus: I have all my data offline so I don't need connectivity, and I lower my environmental impact.
Too often products feel like a reinvention of the whole stack because it's easier to sell, rather than reusing proven tools and using them the way they were supposed to be used.
Not sure if it currently does all you'd want, but the founders are responsive on email so perhaps worth asking for any features that you'd like them to add!
If you want to save the entire snapshot of the web page for archival and references purpose, I think zotero is a good choice. But it's not a good read-it-later product.
It doesn't have fancy graphical previews and stuff like that, but it works and archives page contents for an extra fee.
GoodLinks if you only use Apple and value privacy.
I don't really care about web service. Any desktop tool that can capture websites like pocket? As in download the stripped-down article. They call it "reader view" sometimes.
There's some extensions/scripts like Markdownload that uses Mozilla's Readibility.js to download stripped-down articles. But it's a bit manual for my taste.
I've wondered about how to exfiltrate all of my accumulated links I've put into Pocket over the past ~7 years or so.
Yeah, this is what has prevented me from moving away. I was a premium user and used to use their search. I’m not anymore but I still want to keep the list around. I still go back and find references that Google doesn’t show anymore.
There are some apps that move data from pocket to kindle or such, but having an import from pocket in a new product would be really nice.
And Pocket keeps having trouble with doing reader mode with sites in 2022 and thus can’t do highlights.
Other than that, it works pretty well with most text-based content. I'm using it through the Android app occasionally, and while the app won't win any design awards, it serves it's purpose.
But the state of the iOS app is, well, not great. Clunky design, with odd syncing. Which is unfortunate as 99% of my use case is reading it on my phone whenever I’m waiting for something.
I’m glad they haven’t changed the Pocket experience too much. I still use and pay for Pocket but I’ll probably jump ship to pinboard or build a personal solution if they do something that diminishes the value I find in it today. The most likely ways this could happen is by reducing functionality (e.g., discontinuing clients/APIs), adding unwanted things (more advertising and social media), and doing things that seem unexplainably arbitrary (see: colorways). Pocket works everywhere I need it to, it has acceptable design and performance, and it has demonstrated some maturity and resilience as a product that’s around 15 years old.
Other solutions I’ve tried include clips in Evernote, OneNote, Zim; the app Keep Everything; the services RainDrop and Larder; and e-mailing myself. All of these except the last turned out to be more of a hassle to put up with than using Pocket.
If Pocket gets worse, I’ll probably make my own solution with e-mail. I practically never look at or for anything I save in Pocket, so it would seem my main attraction is the ease of sending things into a vault from anywhere I’m likely to use the internet and the confidence that I can find these another day. I’ll probably be able to access all my old e-mails in 10 years, there’s pretty good search, and it’s ubiquitous (although it is easier to use HTTP than SMTP in some scenarios).
Some people also use Pocket as a repository.