No Longer Posting to Pinboard
24 comments
·February 12, 2025eitland
I stopped paying (and using it) a couple of years ago. I have a lifetime account so my bookmarks are still there.
Reason: I had started paying yearly for the archive option and it stopped working and I tried and failed several times to get in contact with support.
I now use raindrop.io, it is reasonably priced, has api, lets me import pinboard bookmarks, and unlike pinboard.in it still works for me.
stringsandchars
I like the fact that there are no new features. The service is mature and doesn't need any changes. Also I use a bookmarklet on mobile (in a more easily-customized iOS browser called iCab), so I have no problems with responsive styling. Sometimes a minimum amount of effort is needed to make a service work the way you want it.
For a while a few years ago the service was unstable, but I haven't noticed any problems recently.
Have no recall of the service-owner's politics - but I do remember he is somewhat 'mercurial' in his emotions - and I've often wondered whether he will just decide to shutdown without warning.
Otherwise the service is minimal, no-nonsense, and no hassle. I don't get this post at all.
notpushkin
I’m a huge fan of Pinboard owner’s talk on website obesity [1], and I like the brutal minimalistic look, so I’ve wanted to try it out for a while now. I am having second thoughts now: no responsive styles, even for the one feature your users are likely to be using on the go, is pretty frustrating at least.
tomaskafka
I would also like there to be an official mobile app for saving links, and browser extensions that actually work and reliably save the pages. I like Maciej, but not adding these in the past like 7 years feels more lazy than minimalistic to me :/.
pitzips
The design of Pinboard exists in a similar but self hosted service called linkding [1]. I've been self hosting with Docker for a few years with no issues I can recall. Just checked and it does have the responsive forms as well.
easygenes
Cool! Is there a straightforward way to import your Pinboard?
vasco
> I’ve also had some issues in the past with the owner of Pinboard. I can’t recall the exact details of their political or other thoughts now, and don’t plan to look for them, but the site fell into my mental bucket of “services to reluctantly not recommend” a while back.
> Mental note: I need a bigger bucket.
This section really makes the author come across as "a hater", specially the last sentence. Like those people you meet that have a problem with everything. I'm being just a hater myself I guess. I never thought I needed to know the politics of the guy who delivers my mail so I also don't really care who made a website. Am I just too careless?
42lux
Over one you have agency over the other you don’t.
antithesis-nl
Nah, the author is just being disingenuous here. Maciej was (is?) a quite enthusiastic fundraiser for the Democrats, and therein lies the rub.
Had he spent his efforts on boosting certain currently-in-vogue tech magnates instead, the title of this blog post would probably have been "Why I'm doubling down on beautiful, stable, minimalist Pinboard, and you should too!"
Alas...
aredox
Maciej is another "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"-type pundit - a.k.a. "smart-ss".
He is sometimes right (his analysis of website obesity), sometimes completely wrong (he argued at length during the COVID pandemic that Belarus was doing something right, when it was obvious from the beginning that it was just a dictatorship cooking numbers - confirmed by post-analysis that shows abnormal rounding and other aberrant distributions) and in both cases he will be insufferably confident and arrogant he got it right.
The kind of guy who never stops to ask himself if he could be wrong, instead devoting all his brainpower finding all the reasons you are certainly wrong. (Which, unsurprisingly, applies when a pinboard user asks for support, too.)
Philpax
Seems unlikely that someone with this profile [0] would be an oligarch booster. It seems more likely that it's about Maciej's slow rightwards shift [1].
[0] https://www.gyford.com/phil/about/
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/anildash.com/post/3lhkkre2h422z
hombre_fatal
Why not link to the boosted Singal post instead of to someone saying it’s super bad?
antithesis-nl
Yeah, possibly, but it just goes to show that vague side-swipes are never good in presumably technical posts, and that I should know better as well :)
onli
If you spent money on a service you do not really need it matters, or at least it should be easy to see how it might matter. Continuing the payment and usage starts to be something of a social connection or a sign of support. More so if it is a one person enterprise. If it then becomes obvious that support might be misplaced separation is the logical step.
Big organisations are a different thing. And you can't pick your mail guy, plus the mail service is faceless as a whole. But think Tesla, there similar mechanisms make buying a car from them quite unattractive now.
zimpenfish
> Why pay for a service, and have the little mental overhead of it existing, when I’ve duplicated it on my own site?
For me, because Pinboard has IFTTT integration where I can feed a whole bunch of things[0] into it automagically. None of the self-hosted services has IFTTT integration or, as far as I've seen thus far, webhook functionality I could feed from IFTTT[1].
I've got a self-made feed from Pinboard to a self-hosted linkhut which works fine (absent the archiving capability but I've never really used that anyway.)
[0] Although sadly that list does keep shrinking as arseholes close off / commercialise their APIs.
[1] A REST API doesn't work because they rely on setting the 'Authorisation' header which, AFAIK, isn't supported in IFTTT's webhook.
bambax
I joined Pinboard at a time when there was no recurring costs, just a small fee to join, for life. I think I paid $10 total, 12 or 15 years ago, and not a penny since. For that amount it's a pretty good deal.
oneeyedpigeon
I loved that earlier pricing model, where the cost increased with each sign-up. It may not have been sustainable in the long-term, but it was an interesting attempt to do something different.
ivolimmen
I think a lot of people write their own bookmarking application in IT. I did. I like Pinboard's lean style; I hope to restyle my application to something similar.
dalemhurley
Why did you start using Pinboard in the first place?
test1235
For me, it was a delicio.us replacement
blangk
I was lucky to get in early and buy a lifetime perpetual account, otherwise I probably wouldn't still use it.
I have been using Pinboard for ages (14k links so far).
I appreciate that it remains unchanged. Many other services have deteriorated over time in their pursuit of "social engagement".
The ability to publicly display my links is useful, though I mainly use it for proactive sharing rather than being discovered.
Pinboard is social in an introvert's way - compared to other platforms that are social like street salesmen soliciting attention.