8 ms·
I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription
- viburnum 2y agoI used pinboard for years until I started saving web pages as PDFs in my Dropbox folder. I got the idea from pinboard’s own archive feature.
- speckx 2y agoI think I paid $5-10 for this as a one-time fee in December 2010. It was one of the best purchases ever. However, by mid-2022, I noticed issues, downtime, weird errors, etc., so I exported and moved on to raindrop.io after emailing support@pinboard.in and not hearing back.
- msephton 2y agoI had to text him one to get Pinboard back up! He did say thanks. But, really, should he have known!?
- reddirtranch 2y agoI too was a refugee from del.icio.us and signed up for ~$11 a year. I also declined the offer to "support" the platform for more $. One thing I DO like is the popular tab, I've found a ton of cool resources there. Just sayin.
- slater 2y agoRe: alternatives, there's also Linkhut: https://ln.ht/ https://ln.ht/
- alexdobrenko 2y agocheck out Sublime - www.sublime.app - simple, beautiful, and communal, so you can discover the cool stuff other ppl are saving too.
- oldpersonintx 2y agoI was early to sign up for pinboard, got the lifetime subscription at $11 I received an email from them asking me to move to a yearly subscription, although I could choose to decline I chose to decline, mostly glad about the decision, I paid what was asked when I originally signed up
- slyall 2y agoSame here. Any time I get annoyed with the site problems I just remind myself I paid once years ago and the site works 99% of the time. I think if I was paying $20/year I would be really annoyed and have moved elsewhere years ago.
- beacon294 2y agoI decided to pay for 3 years to give myself enough runway to not think about it, I have 9 months left. So I guess I'm giving up and switching to self hosted.
- runjake 2y agoSame with me but I chose to switch to the yearly subscription. I basically got ignored just the same. I use Raindrop.io for now. Maciej is aware of the outrage, if you can call it that. He seems rather hostile to those angry customers. My hunch is that he got bored with Pinboard and plans to ignore it until it dies. Or breaks and then he does the minimum viable to get it duct taped again. I personally like Maciej but just telling it like it is.
- ghoomketu 2y agoWow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of "Don't be a free user" (1) is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it's in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn (2)). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn't sustain itself. It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to market forces and operational challenges. Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end. (1) https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ (2) https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+pinboard https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+pinboard
- slater 2y ago> Wow, the irony is Pinboard [...] is now shutting down. Where are you seeing that?
- omega3 2y agoPinboard isn't shutting down.
- b5 2y agoIs Pinboard actually closing? There’s nothing to indicate that on the site’s blog or its Twitter[2] (which had a post four days ago). [1]: https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ [2]: https://x.com/Pinboard https://x.com/Pinboard
- personjerry 2y agoEvery paid service shuts down eventually.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoWho said it's shutting down? It could also be that maciej has enough paying users that he can afford to coast and be unresponsive, losing some users in the process, in order to do whatever else he's doing these days. The about page says 30,000 active users; most must be paying since there is no free service it seems (though there used to be way back in the day; I used it myself). If half of those are paying, that's $330K a year. Not bad.
- supahfly_remix 2y agoFWIW, Pinboard's founder is still actively commenting (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords) on HN as of 7 days ago.
- creaktive 2y agoI’m frankly impressed by how many people still use Pinboard! Like, when I pin some recent niche news article, Pinboard shows that other tens of people already did the same…
- mcgrath_sh 2y agoI have requested my full archive download a couple of times over the last year and haven't been able to get it, which stinks. I keep trying to figure out a migration plan, but it seems daunting, especially with so many archived bookmarks. I love the service and want to keep using it, but the inability to get a backup archive makes me nervous.
- creaktive 2y agoYep, stopped working for me years ago. Had to contact The Guy personally every single time, because my archive grew to 20GB. He’s not responsive for years tho :(
- ww2supercut 2y agoHow are others storing their bookmarks now? I've moved to Google Sheets for some cases, but it's much less powerful
- atombender 2y agoRaindrop is fantastic: https://raindrop.io/ https://raindrop.io/.
- bradbarrish 2y agoI also migrated from Pinboard to Raindrop and can confirm it's a great service, is updated regularly and while I've generally not received quick responses to questions or feedback, I do eventually. It's also worth mentioning that at least for iOS and MacOS, it has nice integrations that work well, which I could never say about Pinboard.
- bananapub 2y ago$28/year, also "AI Suggestions" is the first item on the "Pro" features list. I'm sure it's a fine CRUD app but I don't really hold hope for it being a long term success.
- 2y ago
- chb 2y agoIt was a surprise to me to discover that Maciej is actually the author behind the idlewords blog. He published this in May of this year: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
- asjir 2y agoto anyone else interested in the topic I've found this video useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIUrvoIdsU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIUrvoIdsU0
- jabroni_salad 2y agoCheck out Shaarli if you are open to self hosted options. Like pinboard it feels old but in a good way (aka it is light on resources and has a limited featureset). However, I will say that I do not care to archive pages and just use the wayback machine for dead links instead.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoIt was murky but I did appreciate that they took over del.icio.us and sort of half made it available again. Regardless, a legend in the game.
- jakub_g 2y agoFor people who didn't read the linked article: Pinboard is not shutting down, just the OP is tired with outages and unresponsiveness of the owner.
- dang 2y agoYeah I was confused by that too, so have replaced the title with more representative language from the article body.
- mkerrigan 2y agoIt really depends on your needs. I use Pinboard on many different browsers and devices and I'm not really interested in running my own service. I'll happily pay for the full text archiving but I acknowledge it is not perfect. I have come to the conclusion if you want to retain full text copies of your bookmarks, you need to download the pages yourself. I have been using SingleFile extension but there is also a CLI available.
- mcgrath_sh 2y agoWhat have you been using for search? The CLI app? What is your download workflow like? Is there an automated way to download a bunch of links, say pulled in from an API?
- mkerrigan 2y agoI don't have nearly as sophisticated setup as [Gwern](https://gwern.net/archiving https://gwern.net/archiving), but they provide an overview of how you might go about it. Right now I manually use the extension on as as needed basis, but I would like to get it to the point where I can point a script at a list of urls and both run SingleFile and also upload to the Wayback Machine
- tinotopia 2y agoI asked him for my full archive download in October 2022, and having heard nothing back I wound up paying him another $39 to keep my archive from being deleted while I tried to get his attention. I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January". I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily. Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.
- beala 2y agoYup also happened to me in 2018. I never received a download link for my archive. My support email was never answered and my archive expired and was deleted.
- tshaddox 2y agoSame thing happened to me around that same time. I've been pretty happy with raindrop.io ever since.
- thelandofrandom 2y agoRaindrop is the GOAT - I backup my links to a Google Sheet with IFTTT just in case but I LOVE Raindrop. (I use the Pro plan)
- ksec 2y agoMany low hanging fruit. I guess many feels the same about support.
- bosquefrio 2y agoIf Maciej is burnt out then I wonder why he hasn't hired someone to do support for him?
- 2y ago
- horse666 2y agoObligatory mention of https://raindrop.io/ https://raindrop.io/ I switched from Pinboard a year or more ago after using it for many years, mainly because I found the iPhone app and integration (eg share feature, to save bookmarks) to be flaky. Raindrop has been great - imported seamlessly from Pinboard and the iPhone and Desktop app work well for me.
- masylum 2y agothere are plenty of good alternatives nowadays: - https://raindrop.io/ https://raindrop.io/: Also a one-man show, but probably the best bookmarking tool out there. - https://omnivore.app https://omnivore.app: Open source and support for newsletters. For my use case though (I like to curate and share), I ended up building an app (https://fika.bar https://fika.bar) to bundle bookmarking + RSS Reader + Blogging.
- Axsuul 2y agoI was a previous Pinboard customer. I've since moved to Linkding[0], a self-hosted solution, and highly recommend it. It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard but gives me much more confidence about the longevity of my bookmarks. 0. https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
- l0b0 2y agoHopefully coming soon to your favourite distro: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/341665 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/341665 :)
- zimpenfish 2y ago> It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard Internally, perhaps, but it doesn't have external feature parity when it comes to, e.g., being able to automagically import things using IFTTT. (Yes, I could probably lash up a webhook feeding into linkding but IFTTT's webhook support still isn't great but I'm already 20 projects behind on my personal list and redoing all my IFTTT recipes that talk to Pinboard isn't going to be a priority.) Linkding is definitely worth a look though as backup.
- vr46 2y agoI barely use it but when I do need to look something up it’s great. But conscious that it’s not super robust, I simply save bookmarks in Zotero now and that works even better on all counts.
- l0b0 2y agoDid Pinboard get bombed by HN? > Error: Connection refused
- aEJ04Izw5HYm 2y agoI still use pinboard every week. I also find it very interesting to follow what other people are pinning. There aren't many niche places to follow ONLY the notable links of other hackers.
- jorgejiro 2y ago[flagged]
- elashri 2y agoIf anyone is interested into self-hosting their bookmarks service so that they don't suffer this again. Here is a list of interesting open source projects that provides that - Linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding - Linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden - Servas https://github.com/beromir/Servas https://github.com/beromir/Servas - Grimoire https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire - Hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder - LinkAce https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/ https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/ - Readeck https://readeck.org/en/ https://readeck.org/en/ - Shaarli https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli - Shirori https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori
- sourweasel 2y ago[dead]
- Trasmatta 2y ago[flagged]
- viraptor 2y agoI'm 99% sure your comment was written by AI. Do I have any proof? No. Does it matter if the content is relevant? No. Should I have just voted instead of accusing someone? Yes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Trasmatta 2y ago> No. Does it matter if the content is relevant? No. I think noting the prevalence of AI generated content masquerading as human is also relevant and important to point out. If I want relevant content written by AI, then I will talk to an AI, not go to a forum. AI generated comments should be tagged as such. For what it's worth, the user edited their comment after I posted so that it no longer appears to be written by AI. The original had all the signs of coming straight out of a ChatGPT prompt (but no longer does). You may have missed the comment before the edit, but it was very obvious.
- seltzered_ 2y agoI'm going to guess pinboard isn't dead, it's just been on the backburner. Idlewords (i.e. maciej) still comments on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33557751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33557751 (2022)
- pixodaros 2y agoPinboard is Maciej Ceglowski's only visible source of income but he seems to be having jerkbrain troubles (moving from the open web to Twitter makes those worse, kids, don't do that)
- joemi 2y agoI still use it all the time and have been quite happy with it. I don't do the full-text archiving, though -- never been of interest to me.
- renewiltord 2y agoThe most I know about this company is the entertaining way in which he demonstrated that Hacker News polls for "who should we fund?" are going to have the same incentives as ones on Reddit. Good times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270 I thought it was really funny. You can't really ask a crowd where to put your money. They'll operate on their own incentives, not yours. And then get pissed off when you don't play along. The classic principal-agent problem but the agents are a mob.
- pixodaros 2y ago1. depression sucks 2. don't go on Twitter kids, it always ends badly 3. trusting a company with a bus factor of 1 is always risky
- blitzpoet 2y agoI'm using bookmarkos.com and it serves my needs. The dev is responsive too.
- brunorsini 2y agoOuch, I never knew my Pinboard data is at risk. Terrifying.