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As someone who does not belong to the old-timer crowd, and in fact pays an extra $25/year for an archival account, the news that Pinboard is even being maintain

As someone who does not belong to the old-timer crowd, and in fact pays an extra $25/year for an archival account, the news that Pinboard is even being maintained comes as a blessing. In the past year things have happened like the API returning invalid JSON for weeks[0] and the search returning an error whenever I wanted to use full-text search (one of the selling points for the extra archival fee.) Not to mention the ongoing issues with page archiving in general (things frequently fail and need to be manually re-queued). I really like Pinboard, I do, but the reliability issues have made me want to look somewhere else. My subscription is set to renew at the end of March and after seeing this I guess I'll give it another year. Here's hoping things trend upwards. [0]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1274055573902774272 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1274055573902774272

bscphil 6y ago
This is interesting to me, because Maciej has repeatedly defended (and joked about) Pinboard having a "bus factor" of 1 (if one person gets hit by a bus, the service is done). To be clear, what I'm saying isn't intended as a criticism, in fact I'm very sympathetic to someone who wants to run a web business solo and maintain control over their own project. But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms! I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.
- nyolfen 6y ago
  how about development bounties by DAO? i’d be surprised if something like this hasn’t already been attempted (i don’t pay close attention to this topic)
- tshaddox 6y ago
  I think he goes out of his way to underpromise reliability and longevity, but the fact is that this will never make people less upset (and reasonably so, in my view) when the service goes down or loses data or disappears forever. Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.” I don’t know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.
  - idlewords 6y ago
    Anyone can promise anything they want. I prefer to lean on my track record. Not a lot of sites can brag about staying continuously online and not losing data for over a decade (exceptions include stavros right here on HN, who runs a competing site to mine). Pinboard is certainly business performance art, but part of the schtick is taking it seriously.
  - cmeacham98 6y ago
    > Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.” I don't think this example is comparable. Most obviously, the effects of failure in Pinboard vs a self driving car kit are vastly different.
- georgeoliver 6y ago
  Interesting comment and I think it touches on a couple of points. First I have a feeling that many Pinboard users are like myself and partly pay for Pinboard because Maciej runs it. After all there are many bookmarking options; I do get some utility out of not having to maintain a self-hosted service but all in all, I think we shouldn't discount the subscription-as-patronage effect here. Regarding member-controlled administration of services, there is an obvious model here: worker co-ops. They don't seem to be that common in tech though . Pubnixes (classic example, SDF) are kind of close perhaps?
JustARandomGuy 6y ago
Seconding this. As much as I love maciej's blog and twitter, Pinboard has been pretty flaky for the time I've used it. I signed up for Pinboard in 2015, have an archiving account prepaid to 2024. The API isn't reliable, archiving is lucky if it gets most of the page, it's not been a great experience so far. I used to use Pinboard with IFTTT and Wordpress to autopost favorite links with a description; two years ago I removed the Pinboard link to my IFTTT account because it just wasn't reliable. Happy to hear of upgrades, one thing I would like to see is getrevue.co integration and full page screenshots of bookmarked pages (also accessible from API). Full page screenshots alone would justify my money.
- slyall 6y ago
  I had some frustrations with the service in the years when it was running on auto-pilot, but since it mostly worked I shrugged it off (although I warned people not to join). If I had been paying $22/year at the time I would have been a lot less happy and would probably have closed my account.
imiric 6y ago
I'm a long time (yearly plan) user with a similar experience. The crux of the issue is that Pinboard's centralized architecture is unsustainable in the long run. It's essentially an on-demand archive.org service with the same ever-increasing storage requirements, which becomes a bigger problem as more users join. It must be difficult for a one (or two) person team to manage, especially since they also chose to manage their own hardware. I assume this is to avoid cloud storage and hosting costs, and I respect the decision, but this can add a lot of overhead on top of just keeping the software performing optimally. The sustainable model for this type of service is self-hosted. https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/ seems like a nice solution I've been meaning to try.
- idlewords 6y ago
  The decision to run my own hardware is due to the extremely high cost of storing and moving ~80TB around on the cloud, as well as running a high-memory MySQL instance. I haven't priced it recently, but the last time I looked it would have raised my costs by an order of magnitude.
  - imiric 6y ago
    I can understand that, but have you considered a pay-per-use / tiered business model? It's clear from this thread that there are users who have thousands of bookmarks, using dozens of GB of storage, and those who use it much less and whose storage costs are negligible. Having either group pay a flat rate doesn't make sense to me, and you end up losing revenue either way. A tiered model could allow you to offset the cloud storage costs, maybe migrate things into the cloud and ease some of the maintenance burden on yourself.
  - juliusmusseau 6y ago
    80TB on AWS is $44K USD / year on their crappy (cheap rotational) "st1" volume.
    - nikisweeting 6y ago
      Or $5k/yr on Backblaze B2 with their free ingress/egress setup https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html#calculator https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html#calc...
blackrock 6y ago
This would actually be ideal for a 1-person business. If you pay $25/year, then the guy only needs to find 10,000 people, to make $250,000/year. Not a bad salary. Now, the question is, what type of SaaS service can you make, to find 10,000 people paying $25/year. One that hasn’t already been consumed by the big players.
- Arcanum-XIII 6y ago
  You forgot to remove the hardware, recurring cost(like the data link) and tax from this estimation.
  - achairapart 6y ago
    I also wonder - in general - about the cost/effort to offer some form of support to 10.000+ users. If half of them has even a basic question, that's already 5.000 answers to deal with.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      A little bit more than 12 answers a day. But if they are basic questions you should be able to resolve a lot of them with a FAQ before you get to 10k customers.
- jasonkester 6y ago
  One strategy that works more often than you’d expect is to pick a business that’s successfully being run by Big Players today and wait for them to self destruct as a result of their need to get Bigger. The business we’re discussing here is a good example of this process.
GVRV 6y ago
I have an old grand-fathered-in Pinboard account, but I couldn't deal with the constant issues so I'm happily paying for https://larder.io/ https://larder.io/ now – powered by a small, independent business, but the product actually works.
- oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
  Another interesting and quite original business model. I like the idea of 'use the product for six months and discover it's so essential, you'll continue subscribing'. What I couldn't find out from the site is whether or not there's an option to export your data if you do decide not to continue - any idea?
  - joshsharp 6y ago
    Yep, there's an API and import/export.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  What is the benefit of using these services over, say, Firefox Sync?
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  I’m trying to decide between the two. I went ahead and paid for a year of Larder. I have prepaid for Pinboard archiving. Larder is so small, there’s no real community around it. I think there’s a cli on GitHub.

bscphil 6y ago

This is interesting to me, because Maciej has repeatedly defended (and joked about) Pinboard having a "bus factor" of 1 (if one person gets hit by a bus, the service is done). To be clear, what I'm saying isn't intended as a criticism, in fact I'm very sympathetic to someone who wants to run a web business solo and maintain control over their own project. But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms! I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.

nyolfen 6y ago
how about development bounties by DAO? i’d be surprised if something like this hasn’t already been attempted (i don’t pay close attention to this topic)
tshaddox 6y ago
I think he goes out of his way to underpromise reliability and longevity, but the fact is that this will never make people less upset (and reasonably so, in my view) when the service goes down or loses data or disappears forever. Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.” I don’t know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.
- idlewords 6y ago
  Anyone can promise anything they want. I prefer to lean on my track record. Not a lot of sites can brag about staying continuously online and not losing data for over a decade (exceptions include stavros right here on HN, who runs a competing site to mine). Pinboard is certainly business performance art, but part of the schtick is taking it seriously.
- cmeacham98 6y ago
  > Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.” I don't think this example is comparable. Most obviously, the effects of failure in Pinboard vs a self driving car kit are vastly different.
georgeoliver 6y ago
Interesting comment and I think it touches on a couple of points. First I have a feeling that many Pinboard users are like myself and partly pay for Pinboard because Maciej runs it. After all there are many bookmarking options; I do get some utility out of not having to maintain a self-hosted service but all in all, I think we shouldn't discount the subscription-as-patronage effect here. Regarding member-controlled administration of services, there is an obvious model here: worker co-ops. They don't seem to be that common in tech though . Pubnixes (classic example, SDF) are kind of close perhaps?

JustARandomGuy 6y ago

Seconding this. As much as I love maciej's blog and twitter, Pinboard has been pretty flaky for the time I've used it. I signed up for Pinboard in 2015, have an archiving account prepaid to 2024. The API isn't reliable, archiving is lucky if it gets most of the page, it's not been a great experience so far. I used to use Pinboard with IFTTT and Wordpress to autopost favorite links with a description; two years ago I removed the Pinboard link to my IFTTT account because it just wasn't reliable. Happy to hear of upgrades, one thing I would like to see is getrevue.co integration and full page screenshots of bookmarked pages (also accessible from API). Full page screenshots alone would justify my money.

slyall 6y ago
I had some frustrations with the service in the years when it was running on auto-pilot, but since it mostly worked I shrugged it off (although I warned people not to join). If I had been paying $22/year at the time I would have been a lot less happy and would probably have closed my account.

imiric 6y ago

I'm a long time (yearly plan) user with a similar experience. The crux of the issue is that Pinboard's centralized architecture is unsustainable in the long run. It's essentially an on-demand archive.org service with the same ever-increasing storage requirements, which becomes a bigger problem as more users join. It must be difficult for a one (or two) person team to manage, especially since they also chose to manage their own hardware. I assume this is to avoid cloud storage and hosting costs, and I respect the decision, but this can add a lot of overhead on top of just keeping the software performing optimally. The sustainable model for this type of service is self-hosted. https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/ seems like a nice solution I've been meaning to try.

idlewords 6y ago
The decision to run my own hardware is due to the extremely high cost of storing and moving ~80TB around on the cloud, as well as running a high-memory MySQL instance. I haven't priced it recently, but the last time I looked it would have raised my costs by an order of magnitude.
- imiric 6y ago
  I can understand that, but have you considered a pay-per-use / tiered business model? It's clear from this thread that there are users who have thousands of bookmarks, using dozens of GB of storage, and those who use it much less and whose storage costs are negligible. Having either group pay a flat rate doesn't make sense to me, and you end up losing revenue either way. A tiered model could allow you to offset the cloud storage costs, maybe migrate things into the cloud and ease some of the maintenance burden on yourself.
- juliusmusseau 6y ago
  80TB on AWS is $44K USD / year on their crappy (cheap rotational) "st1" volume.
  - nikisweeting 6y ago
    Or $5k/yr on Backblaze B2 with their free ingress/egress setup https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html#calculator https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html#calc...

blackrock 6y ago

This would actually be ideal for a 1-person business. If you pay $25/year, then the guy only needs to find 10,000 people, to make $250,000/year. Not a bad salary. Now, the question is, what type of SaaS service can you make, to find 10,000 people paying $25/year. One that hasn’t already been consumed by the big players.

Arcanum-XIII 6y ago
You forgot to remove the hardware, recurring cost(like the data link) and tax from this estimation.
- achairapart 6y ago
  I also wonder - in general - about the cost/effort to offer some form of support to 10.000+ users. If half of them has even a basic question, that's already 5.000 answers to deal with.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    A little bit more than 12 answers a day. But if they are basic questions you should be able to resolve a lot of them with a FAQ before you get to 10k customers.
jasonkester 6y ago
One strategy that works more often than you’d expect is to pick a business that’s successfully being run by Big Players today and wait for them to self destruct as a result of their need to get Bigger. The business we’re discussing here is a good example of this process.

GVRV 6y ago

I have an old grand-fathered-in Pinboard account, but I couldn't deal with the constant issues so I'm happily paying for https://larder.io/ https://larder.io/ now – powered by a small, independent business, but the product actually works.

oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
Another interesting and quite original business model. I like the idea of 'use the product for six months and discover it's so essential, you'll continue subscribing'. What I couldn't find out from the site is whether or not there's an option to export your data if you do decide not to continue - any idea?
- joshsharp 6y ago
  Yep, there's an API and import/export.
Aeolun 6y ago
What is the benefit of using these services over, say, Firefox Sync?
skinnymuch 6y ago
I’m trying to decide between the two. I went ahead and paid for a year of Larder. I have prepaid for Pinboard archiving. Larder is so small, there’s no real community around it. I think there’s a cli on GitHub.