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Pocket migration to Firefox accounts
- Animats 5y agoWill it become necessary to log in to use Firefox?
- slowbdotro 5y agoYou had to login to use pocket before, what is different now?
- LegitShady 5y agoIt isn't. The firefox account features things like sharing your bookmarks/history/etc between devices easily. You don't need to use it to use firefox.
- userbinator 5y agoGiven that we've seen things like Windows take the "you need to create an online account" route, and only a decade ago that would've seemed absolutely absurd, I think your question raises a good point and the downvotes are unjustified. 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."
- Animats 5y agoThat's what I was getting at. Who would have thought you'd need an account to read a newspaper or watch broadcast TV over the internet?
- blibble 5y agoI noticed when my firefox upgraded itself I got yet another giant fullscreen pocket ad...
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agoWe still got no news about self hosting of pocket. Does authentication work with a selfhosted Firefox Accounts instance?
- 3np 5y agoI don't think I've seen anything official after this: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/pocket-source-code/43686/12 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/pocket-source-code/43686/12 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? https://github.com/Pocket https://github.com/Pocket 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 https://github.com/mozilla/fxa/issues/10635
- encryptluks2 5y agoFirefox accounts are terrible. I recently thought I had a second account because I got some error about not using the primary account when trying to reset the password using that email. Turns out that Mozilla still had an old account connected even though it was removed in their interface. If you look through their bug report history they've been plagued with similar issues that they've never been able to figure out. The Firefox Sync protocol is a mess.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoWorks much better for me than Chrome had.
- encryptluks2 5y agoYou mean regular Google accounts?
- oblak 5y agoHas anyone around here tried to run their own pocket/ff account replacement server for session management? I did some reading a couple of years ago but got caught up in other things and never even tried doing it.
- 3np 5y agoI recently set up a Firefox Accounts server - basically the minimum parts necessary for a self-contained FFSync, without either calling home to Mozilla or their integrated third-parties (mostly payments and analytics; AWS, GCP, Paypal, Stripe, and a few others). A handful of microservices and a few MySQL databases and I think a Redis or two? I only recommend doing it if you enjoy it for the challenge, the stack it's clearly not engineered with an independent self-hoster in mind (though they do support it and people are helpful). It took several days to get up and running. I will share this soon, I hope... 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) ...and "just glue them together" with JWT tokens (look for the scripts in the repo instead of trying to find enlightenment through the source code, docs and issues... heh) and your reverse proxy or load balancer of choice.
- no_time 5y agoBasically impossible to do without docker and even then, it feels like it would be a full time job to maintain. 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.
- 3np 5y agoSee my sibling. It’s a mess to do the initial setup but after that the maintenance is trivial and quite hands-off.
- gnicholas 5y agoHas Pocket improved in any way since this acquisition? Or is their team tied up with integrations like this and unable to add any new features or improvements?
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- JaggedJax 5y agoThis is such a nothing story it's surprising it's so high on hn. There's nothing new with Pocket and nothing new with Firefox, so why are we all complaining about things unrelated to this story? Almost any company will move to provide SSO for all their connected products. Having a separate ff and pocket login is silly at this point.
- grammarnazzzi 5y agoBecause a simple, integrated part of the pocket product just turned into a dependency on a large, complex, fragile ecosystem. 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.
- matsemann 5y agoBecause HN loves complaining about how bad Mozilla is, and that they therefore instead use Chrome...
- nine_k 5y agoNevertheless, HN crowd would gladly lambast Google, too.
- jacquesm 5y agoMozilla is the best of the rest, and it's fine to use it instead of Chrome and still be critical of Mozilla.
- matsemann 5y agoYeah, of course. I just find it tiresome hearing "Mozilla did X, therefore I use Chrome", when Google on the same metrics is orders of magnitudes worse.
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoI use Mozilla for the same reason I vote for a shitty political party. Nothing better exists than the heaping turd that we have.
- grammarnazzzi 5y ago> Why is Pocket migrating to Firefox accounts? ... 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) 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.
- gnicholas 5y agoWhen a company with a huge user base (Mozilla) acquires a company with a much smaller user base (Pocket), they're probably not doing it to cross-sell the smaller user base. 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.
- chrisseaton 5y agoSo what was the point?
- Computeiful 5y agoMoney laundering? Fundamental incompetence? Pick any reason honestly, they all make the same amount of sense. I've never understood why Mozilla bought Pocket.
- gnicholas 5y agoI don’t know what the economics were, but it may have been a soft landing / acquihire. I’m sure some people believed in the business case, but the driving force for the acquisition may well have been a VC that wanted an exit, a well-connected founder, etc.
- m-p-3 5y agoI'm wondering if this will affect the Pocket integration on Kobo eReaders.
- hellacious 5y agoHi all! I'm the head of product at Pocket. We're in active conversations with Kobo right now to find ways to preserve that connection. It's a really important one for us.
- m-p-3 5y agoThank you for being proactive on this! It's one of my favorite feature on the Kobo and I'd be disappointed to see it break.
- anotherevan 5y agoAbsolutely the first thing I wondered and came here to comment on. Not answered in the FAQ section of the page.
- app4soft 5y agoSo, how to fully disable it via `about:config` now?
- djbusby 5y agoDamnit. I use a fork of FF that has all the (worthless) Pocket stuff removed. So, now I'll be stuck refactoring my patches. I feel like every FF related post reminds me that Mozilla has lost their way. What can be done to bring it back?
- freeAgent 5y agoI just disable pocket in about:config. It’s annoying that I have to do that at all, but it does the trick.
- blibble 5y ago> 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
- yolo42 5y agoSomewhat tangentially related. Pocket seems like a dead product. I have been using it since it can out but it feels old, slow and quite behind. 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.
- nicbou 5y agoI am also looking for an alternative. Pocket just isn't good at what it's supposed to do: saving articles for later reading, often offline.
- vymague 5y agoSame. I miss pocket's chrome app. Worked great when offline too. 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.
- AA-BA-94-2A-56 5y agoInstapaper is you like cross-platform, including Kindle. GoodLinks if you only use Apple and value privacy.
- adambyrtek 5y agoInstapaper after multiple acquisitions feels even more abandoned than Pocket.
- eole666 5y agoI heard Wallabag is a nice Pocket alternative. And you can host it yourself. I'll try putting it on my odroid one of this day. 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)
- _-david-_ 5y agoIs pocket open source yet?
- lemoncookiechip 5y agoPocket is basically unusable for me without the extension In My Pocket, which is basically a companion extension, that makes it a lot more like it used to be in the past.
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- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y agoI use zotero for this. I have a "interesting_reads" collection that I save stuff I see on the internet (like from HN) and want to read later. It takes 'snapshot' of the website so you can read it offline, or in case it disappears. [1] https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/
- anotherevan 5y agoHmmm, the bookmarklet recently stopped working. I wonder if this is related in any way.