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> 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 not contain

• chimeracoder 1y ago
  > and I will never trust Mozilla with any service again. Who will you trust? Google? Apple? Microsoft? It's not like any of the other behemoths have a better track record when it comes to long-term maintenance and availability of hosted consumer products. If anything, Mozilla actually has the best track record out of them all when it comes to long-term offerings.
  • walterbell 1y ago
    > Who will you trust? Your-self-hosted?
    • reaperducer 1y ago
      Your-self-hosted? Only if you're among the .0001% of people who can code it yourself. Otherwise, nothing is different; you're always relying on someone else for their software, feature, security, and compatibility updates.
      • walterbell 1y ago
        Are we on Hacker News?
        • 4ndrewl 1y ago
          Yeah, bit weird - surely the population of HN is either going to be - people who _can_ code it themselves, or - people who believe they can get AI to code it for them
          • doubled112 1y ago
            I'm in a third group: people who can decide if somebody else's code is "good enough" to host it themselves
            • 4ndrewl 1y ago
              For my definition of code in this context you're in the first group, as you're doubtless going to have to modify some Dockerfile/.env/config.yaml to point the flapdoodle_cache setting to /usr/local/.this/fnar
      • homebrewer 1y ago
        I'm self-hosting a couple of services that stopped receiving updates (including security updates) about 10 years ago. They still serve my needs perfectly well. They're hidden behind HTTP authentication (with HTTPS) so the internet noise ("AI" shit, web scrapers, shodan, script kiddies) doesn't even know they exist.
      • jauntywundrkind 1y ago
        It's a pity Sandstorm never super took off. Portable serverless with really nice security built in meant really easy to deploy apps; app server just for you or for a group of people was so nice & easy. I really hope we someday have self-hosting that isn't as intimidating, that isn't a million different systems all complex in their own way, where there's a base platform with base assumptions and base tools, that let's us manage our self-hosted apps & their data.
      • bee_rider 1y ago
        Code? For self-hosting? I hope not. Most programmers shouldn’t be programming internet-facing stuff. (FWIW I include myself in “most programmers”). Get it from your repository. In that case you are trusting somebody like Debian or Redhat. They’ve earned an awful lot of trust.
  • xnx 1y ago
    > Who will you trust? Google? Google has very good/complete Takeout data for most of its services.
  • catlover76 1y ago
    [dead]
  • ummonk 1y ago
    What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.
    • madeofpalk 1y ago
      iTunes Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping. I never trusted Apple after they got rid of that /s Apple's problem is they'll often leave products to be stagnant. Existing, but on life support. Like basically all their Mac Apps. A lot of hardware products like this as well, like HomePods. They have a raft of iOS apps that seemingly come out of hackathon projects that they release, never update, and then maybe quietly kill off. I thought they killed Clips, but it's still hanging out there...
      • ikomrad 1y ago
        And here I thought I was the only person who used that service. RIP Apple Ping. It met the same fate as Facebook Ping.
    • chimeracoder 1y ago
      > What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device. Apple is a bit of a weird case because historically they've been a hardware company first and have done very little in the way of consumer services. But they're just as happy as to kill off consumer products if they want to; they just have a more limited selection to start from (which is itself another layer to the "problem" of trying to use them as a replacement - you can't rely on a product they don't offer).
  • thrdbndndn 1y ago
    His point is about data portability, not service uptime. This export feature is outright bad, worse than the industry standard by a mile. Why wouldn't it include something as basic as tags? It just forces users to write their own scripts, wasting time for everyone involved.
    • jamienicol 1y ago
      It does include tags
  • Buxato 1y ago
    I trust none of that ones, only Google for one of my emails and my Android phone. The track of abandoned services of Mozilla is astonishing.
  • rockskon 1y ago
    Chasing the ever-cycling list of organizations that haven't yet betrayed trust with regards to privacy. If you're going to go with the "who can you trust" angle then you need to qualify that with a type of product. Also? An organization's past doesn't dictate their present.
• FeistySkink 1y ago
  Not sure what they mean by tags, but my export seems to have all my tags.
• bobsmooth 1y ago
  Downthemall might help with downloading all those links, depending on what they are.
  • larrywright 1y ago
    I never used Pocket but was a long time user of Instapaper before moving to Readwise Reader. My experience has been that many links, other than the most recent ones, are dead.
• tbr11 1y ago
  the csv file I downloaded has a column for tags, pipe separated
• sambaumann 1y ago
  anyone have any good suggestions for a self-hosted option?
  • akirk 1y ago
    WordPress + Friends + Post Collection plugins (+send to e-reader), see https://youtu.be/kHaODAUazwE?t=214 https://youtu.be/kHaODAUazwE?t=214
  • duck 1y ago
    I've been using https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding and highly recommend it.
  • pratio 1y ago
    I use linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding Have been hosting it for years, there’s a browser extension and a phone app by a third party developer as well. I also tried readeck for a while but went back to lindking because of missing features https://readeck.org/en/ https://readeck.org/en/ There’s also linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden Too colourful for me, can’t like the design And there’s also karakeep https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
    • enjikaka 1y ago
      I wrote this Deno script to convert the Pocket CSV export to a Bookmark HTML-file so that it can be imported to Linkding: https://github.com/enjikaka/pocket-to-bookmark https://github.com/enjikaka/pocket-to-bookmark
      • appel 1y ago
        Thank you! Hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty to have Gemini convert it to python, since I'm not familiar with Deno. Appears to work just fine. I posted a gist here in case it is useful to anyone else: https://gist.github.com/appel/a6accfab384f80cb12c9c20a1075e942 https://gist.github.com/appel/a6accfab384f80cb12c9c20a1075e9... I'm of course happy to take it down if you do mind, just let me know. And thank you again!
• JeremyNT 1y ago
  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.
  • hyperhopper 1y ago
    > I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands. Never trust a company like this. You'll always get burned. If it's not FOSS, its not reliable and will likely burn you
  • bossyTeacher 1y ago
    > I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction For most people, Mozilla is just the company developing Firefox and Firefox is the Mozilla product. Mozilla's pivot into the web's hero is coming at the price of Firefox and people are not happy. Their current situation where they depend financially on Google just doesn't feel right. And I understand that Google has been asked to stop financing Mozilla. Tough times will be coming for them
  • thayne 1y ago
    Mozilla's track record of shutting down projects is almost as bad as Google's. I wouldn't count on any of their non-Firefox projects lasting very long.
  • OddMerlin 1y ago
    I'm with you. I think it's great that Mozilla is trying/tried to extend their value beyond just the browser. I found pocket immensely useful. Having the ability to have my kobo e-reader sync pocket articles to read off-line was such a useful feature. I don't understand the Mozilla hate on this board. I think it's wildly overblown.
    • kyleee 1y ago
• sdk16420 1y ago
  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.com/premium https://web.archive.org/web/20250321050043/https://getpocket...
  • ternaryoperator 1y ago
    On that archived page: "A forever home for your collection" Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.
    • daemin 1y ago
      Like when people assume a "lifetime guarantee" is for the lifetime of themselves. More correctly it means for the lifetime of the company or the product support cycle.
    • rollcat 1y ago
      SaaS rots faster than the bits on your spinning rust. The incentive structure tends to drift away from a corp's long-term strategy. If you don't own it, you don't own it. Even the bits you own rot faster than brick and mortar. It's just the nature of the universe - cosmic rays, magnetosphere, etc. Doesn't help that the integrated circuits are smaller, and hence much more brittle with each generation. And do you even own the hardware you purchased? Even before the ongoing craze to turn fridges into subscriptions into landfill. Try some "retro" devices from 15, 20, 30y ago - many builtin websites/apps/services just 404, long before companies planned for obsolescence. Only diamonds are forever.
      • ternaryoperator 1y ago
        Agreed, except none of those things (Saas, hardware, etc.) explicitly promises you a forever timeframe. That's really what I'm poking at--the promise, rather than the reality, which you quite accurately describe.
      • 1y ago
• tristanho 1y ago
  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)
  • TiredOfLife 1y ago
    Thanks. Will try. Currently Pocket seems to be overloaded, but hopefully it recovers in the 30 trial days. While your app seems nice on first glance the 10$ a month is not a small amount for non americans. 10$ a year I could stomach.
    • tristanho 1y ago
      Cool! The import should auto-retry, but in case something gets snagged there you can also always do `cmd+k -> pocket` to retrigger a full import. Totally hear you on price.. Reader is built for people who spend a lot of time reading and can justify it (and the sub also comes with access to our Readwise product too). We also have a 50% off discount for students as well folks in countries with depressed currencies (eg India, South American countries, etc) which might help. We try our best, but are also bootstrapped and have to charge enough to keep the company sustainable!
      • TiredOfLife 1y ago
        I can't even connect to Pocket.
  • uxcolumbo 1y ago
    So your app will also import the archived copies from Pocket? It's mainly about importing archived content from links that might now be dead.
    • 1y ago
• sanjayts 1y ago
  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 https://raindrop.io/integrations/pocket
• pouulet 1y ago
  The tags are exported : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-list 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.
  • thrdbndndn 1y ago
    The page was "Last updated: 24 minutes ago". Someone at Mozilla saw this HN post and modified it (unsure if the export feature itself was changed or not). You can tell it's a rushed edit as "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." reads very unnatural. Via Wayback Machine, it can be easily verified that the old versions of it, both the one edited very recently or the old ones in 2024, said "does not contain tags or highlights". https://web.archive.org/web/20250415002842/https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-list https://web.archive.org/web/20250415002842/https://support.m... https://web.archive.org/web/20250522175656/https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-list https://web.archive.org/web/20250522175656/https://support.m...
    • tbr11 1y ago
      My export from March had tags, my guess is this docs page just got missed when they updated the export months ago
    • throwaway314155 1y ago
      Doesn't have to be a conspiracy. They saw a comment about a mistake in the article and made a clumsy edit in an attempt to remedy the mistake.
      • thrdbndndn 1y ago
        I didn't mean that there is a conspiracy, just that OP wasn't lying and the doc was indeed saying it won't save tags. (Now I read it, it does sound like so. My bad.)
• KPGv2 1y ago
  I just got my export, and it has the tags. Fields are: title, url, time_added, tags, and status The tags field is a pipe-separated list of tags
• randomor 1y ago
  I just did an export while trying to create an importer to my app DoubleMemory. Pocket actually does export tags. It’s probably a miscommunication. Here is what the raw csv look like if you check my tool example: https://doublememory.com/posts/tools/pocket/ https://doublememory.com/posts/tools/pocket/ The text that’s separated by pipe are the tags.