Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

> every other browser

You can just say Chromium

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.

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 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'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?

This was one of my considerations when I chose Kobo over Kindle. Very unfortunate, indeed.

Check the barebones but functional Wallabag. Hosted version available for a fee.

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.

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.

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)

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...

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.

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.

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.

the csv file I downloaded has a column for tags, pipe separated

anyone have any good suggestions for a self-hosted option?

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.

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.

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 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 can't recommend Raindrop enough if you're looking for alternatives

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 would have absolutely loved this. I would love for someone to do this with Substack or podcast transcripts.

If I’d have known about them sooner, they’d have all my money.

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?

omnivore got acquired, they shut down: https://web.archive.org/web/20250503155629/https://blog.omni...

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.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.