4 ms·

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

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.

lttlrck 1y ago
What's your other theory? ;-)
- j1elo 1y ago
  +1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
mikemcg0 1y ago
Agree on search being abysmal - I'm surprised that none of these readings apps realized that the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet. perch.app is the newest entrant to this space, and it's the closest I've seen to getting this right.
- twilo 1y ago
  Best alt other than perch? For whatever reason I can’t get it to show up in the share/send menu on iOS and doesn’t seem to have a browser extension. How do you send articles to it?
  - medstrom 1y ago
    Maybe https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in? I haven't used it, but it tempts me a few times per decade.
    - kome 1y ago
      it's very good because it's simple and hasn't changed in over 10 years. you know it won't change, and it's the best $6.28 I've ever invested (but of course, I wouldn't pay for it every year; I would find another solution).
  - dgoldstein0 1y ago
    I recently started using wallabag. Seems to do the job decently
    - benjaminoakes 1y ago
      I'm glad people are mentioning Wallabag. It's open source and self-hostable, so it's not as likely to disappear on you. If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem#hosted-servers https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem... I've run Wallabag before but stopped around the time my son was born so I'd have more time to take care of him. And... I switched to Pocket. Oh well! I guess I'll switch back now, probably for good.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  > the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet. This is not the right solution for me. Pocket was the perfect one, even in the first iteration. I don't want discovery. I want a personal box/shelf which keeps a list of what I want to read and what I have read. Permanent copies was a great add-on while it lasted too. Because I want the version I have seen. Not the edited/updated one. Perch doesn't work the way I want. In fact, it's the direct opposite of what I need.
gxqoz 1y ago
Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared). Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.
- chii 1y ago
  > having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy! I think it's more easily explained by incompetence. Esp. when stop words like 'of' and 'the' are somehow included in the index. These are almost trivial to remove prior to indexing (any decent indexing library, such as lucene, would have a prepared list of stop words filter, and it's not like you even need to do any work to have it!).
  - kamarg 1y ago
    > the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy! Sure it should be but reality says Google has many more and probably better lawyers so the risk is clearly different.
- alias_neo 1y ago
  Is something like Apache Solr (a search index) well suited for something like this? I've deployed and used it at work for searching specific, well-specified bits of information, but I don't know how well it would work on large chunks of text like articles etc; I assume this is its real purpose and it should fit, but I'm guessing.
poopsmithe 1y ago
What was the theory!!! I had to read your comment twice looking for it, only to realize that there was no theory in there!
- ycombinete 1y ago
  I think it was that people stopped using Pocket because the search was so bad.
trinsic2 1y ago
I used to use Rain.drop, not the same a pocket, but similar. I imported the data into Obsidian and I now use that for information I want to save online using the clipper plugin. It's changed my life. If you like customizing the searchability and displaying content from saved pages, is the best IMHO.
- itair 1y ago
  Rain.drop is Russian, isn't it?
  - fobo66 1y ago
    The maintainer of Raindrop is from Kazakhstan
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Looks like neat workflow. I use Obsidian too, but not in that way. I don't want a collage of what I have read, I want a database which I can dig, like Pocket. Looks like my future lies in a self-hosted Wallabag instance.
grvdrm 1y ago
I’m curious: with that many saves, what were you main reasons for using Pocket? Did you glean info at scale or is it just the case that you saved so much, read some subset, and it grew over time?
- bayindirh 1y ago
  The initial idea was nice: do not lose what you want to read later (the list), keep a list of what you read (archive). Then it became better with “Permanent copies”: never lose content you want to read again later. That number is a combination of all three, plus more than a decade of active use.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    Damn, any alternatives in mind for that workflow? My killer feature that led me to start using Pocket was Kobo integration: I could hit a button on my computer and continue reading an article on my ereader, duly cleaned up.
    - 486sx33 1y ago
      [dead]
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      Since I'm slowly moving to self-hosting, I'll be installing Wallabag[0] most probably. I also integrated my Kobo with Pocket with glee, but it turned into gloom when my saves ate all of the free memory of the reader :) [0]: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

lttlrck 1y ago

What's your other theory? ;-)

j1elo 1y ago
+1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

mikemcg0 1y ago

Agree on search being abysmal - I'm surprised that none of these readings apps realized that the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet. perch.app is the newest entrant to this space, and it's the closest I've seen to getting this right.

twilo 1y ago
Best alt other than perch? For whatever reason I can’t get it to show up in the share/send menu on iOS and doesn’t seem to have a browser extension. How do you send articles to it?
- medstrom 1y ago
  Maybe https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in? I haven't used it, but it tempts me a few times per decade.
  - kome 1y ago
    it's very good because it's simple and hasn't changed in over 10 years. you know it won't change, and it's the best $6.28 I've ever invested (but of course, I wouldn't pay for it every year; I would find another solution).
- dgoldstein0 1y ago
  I recently started using wallabag. Seems to do the job decently
  - benjaminoakes 1y ago
    I'm glad people are mentioning Wallabag. It's open source and self-hostable, so it's not as likely to disappear on you. If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem#hosted-servers https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem... I've run Wallabag before but stopped around the time my son was born so I'd have more time to take care of him. And... I switched to Pocket. Oh well! I guess I'll switch back now, probably for good.
bayindirh 1y ago
> the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet. This is not the right solution for me. Pocket was the perfect one, even in the first iteration. I don't want discovery. I want a personal box/shelf which keeps a list of what I want to read and what I have read. Permanent copies was a great add-on while it lasted too. Because I want the version I have seen. Not the edited/updated one. Perch doesn't work the way I want. In fact, it's the direct opposite of what I need.

gxqoz 1y ago

Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared). Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.

chii 1y ago
> having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy! I think it's more easily explained by incompetence. Esp. when stop words like 'of' and 'the' are somehow included in the index. These are almost trivial to remove prior to indexing (any decent indexing library, such as lucene, would have a prepared list of stop words filter, and it's not like you even need to do any work to have it!).
- kamarg 1y ago
  > the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy! Sure it should be but reality says Google has many more and probably better lawyers so the risk is clearly different.
alias_neo 1y ago
Is something like Apache Solr (a search index) well suited for something like this? I've deployed and used it at work for searching specific, well-specified bits of information, but I don't know how well it would work on large chunks of text like articles etc; I assume this is its real purpose and it should fit, but I'm guessing.

poopsmithe 1y ago

What was the theory!!! I had to read your comment twice looking for it, only to realize that there was no theory in there!

ycombinete 1y ago
I think it was that people stopped using Pocket because the search was so bad.

trinsic2 1y ago

I used to use Rain.drop, not the same a pocket, but similar. I imported the data into Obsidian and I now use that for information I want to save online using the clipper plugin. It's changed my life. If you like customizing the searchability and displaying content from saved pages, is the best IMHO.

itair 1y ago
Rain.drop is Russian, isn't it?
- fobo66 1y ago
  The maintainer of Raindrop is from Kazakhstan
bayindirh 1y ago
Looks like neat workflow. I use Obsidian too, but not in that way. I don't want a collage of what I have read, I want a database which I can dig, like Pocket. Looks like my future lies in a self-hosted Wallabag instance.

grvdrm 1y ago

I’m curious: with that many saves, what were you main reasons for using Pocket? Did you glean info at scale or is it just the case that you saved so much, read some subset, and it grew over time?

bayindirh 1y ago
The initial idea was nice: do not lose what you want to read later (the list), keep a list of what you read (archive). Then it became better with “Permanent copies”: never lose content you want to read again later. That number is a combination of all three, plus more than a decade of active use.
- andrepd 1y ago
  Damn, any alternatives in mind for that workflow? My killer feature that led me to start using Pocket was Kobo integration: I could hit a button on my computer and continue reading an article on my ereader, duly cleaned up.
  - 486sx33 1y ago
    [dead]
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Since I'm slowly moving to self-hosting, I'll be installing Wallabag[0] most probably. I also integrated my Kobo with Pocket with glee, but it turned into gloom when my saves ate all of the free memory of the reader :) [0]: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag