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Comment by purple-dragon | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have experience to share re: Instapaper vs. Pocket (or something better)?

I was a heavy user of Instapaper and switched to Pocket.

The reading interface for Instapaper is much better. Pocket has more clients, browser plug ins, etc so you can take it anywhere (When I switched Instapaper Android wasn't available).

Both are lame when bookmarking things like github repos.

I really want these services to open up their engine so that I can write a plug in for displaying bookmarked gists or repos.

I run a rival site to these. Can you email me a description of what this kind of plugin would do? (support@pinboard.in)

As someone who is concerned with where Instapaper is heading, how well does your site compete with the likes of Instapaper or Pocket?

sort of different use cases. I love pinboard and use it heavily, but it does nothing for the reading experience afaik (that's not a knock, i love pinboard, but it doesn't do what pocket or instapaper do for making anything more readable).

Poorly on making things readable, but really well on not going out of business or being bought by anyone.

I've not used pinboard, but I think a good feature would include a time lapse... I mean I bookmark something then categorize it, then its in a certain folder, and I forget about it, after 3 or so months, I would like to be reminded about it.

Oh, I didn't realize Pinboard had a Read Later feature. I thought it was just a bookmarking service. I finally found some info about Read Later on your website, though I didn't see it where I first looked (in your FAQ). So this is different than your Archival feature, yea?

It's just a status flag you can set on a bookmark. It's useful for saving stuff you want to pretend you're going to read, then will never look at again.

As someone who just logged back in to Instapaper to find a pile of articles 3+ years old, still unread.. You know your business.

I'm slowly making my way through. Thanks so much for your service. It's wonderful.

You should check out wallabag. It's a FOSS alternative to these services. Can self-hosted it or use framabag hosting already set up for you. Build upon it as much as you want!

I'm a huge fan of Pinboard. I like that it has a clear I-am-the-customer profit model, and it's performed flawlessly for me for several years now.

+1. Been using Pinboard for a couple years now, it's worked perfectly.

Are there apps that work with Pinboard? I'd like to support it, but I want to be able to background sync my saved stuff to my phone, like I do with Pocket.

There are several third party apps - I'm using Pinner, and it means I can save pages on the go from the usual share menu, and of course access my saved links.

Sure. Pinner for iOS looks good, works well, and has a share extension to allow you send pages from Safari directly to Pinboard. I like Spillo for macOS for the same reasons.

Unfortunately there are no good iOS apps for it. The only decent one, Pinner, decided, inexplicably, to drop iOS 9 support as soon as iOS 10 was released. iOS 9 is still fully supported by Apple. (Using iOS 10 isn’t an option for me for now). The iOS 9 version’s share extension still has a few bugs that completely block the third-party apps’ UI when adding URLs. Also the Pinner developer never responds to any support requests. I’ve tried sending him emails and hit him up on Twitter. He is completely silent.

All the other iOS apps I’ve tried are laughably crippled. One of the apps I tried (Pinswift) still opens all links in an embedded web view, which means I couldn’t easily log into any sites because I’d have to copy and paste the credentials and OTP manually (NYTimes, WaPost, GitHub, etc). This also means no ad blocking or other protections and functionality offered by the SafariViewController feature in iOS.

I’d also expect for $9.99 plus a $1.99 for “Premium Fonts” Pushpin for Pinboard to be excellent but it isn’t. It’s unstable and its share extension isn’t as flexible as Pinner’s.

That said, Pinboard is a good service. It cares about my privacy, which is very important to me, and has the features I need for a bookmarking service. It is not a read-later service. For example, the article caching features that it provides is web-only and isn’t available through the API so no third-party app can integrate it. This means there is no truly offline reading experience since I’d have to have access to the Pinboard website if I want to read a cached link.

Do you know if there is any good software for windows and/or Linux (Ubuntu specifically) for pinboard? Nothing seems to be actually good, and Pinner seems to be the first client I've seen that actually looks good.

EDIT: Windows would be the main win for me if a good client exists, as that's my main OS. I only use Ubuntu at work.

Sorry, I don’t. ReadKit on OS X is decent (and is the only native Mac app that I could find that actually integrates the Pinboard API) but I don’t know of anything else on other platforms.

I’ll have to start looking for this, soon, however. I’m seriously considering switching. Another service that seems to have no native clients on Windows or Linux is Feedbin.

It used to be that one could find tons of native apps for Windows for pretty much anything. Now there’re hardly any for popular services. I’m not sure if this is because of Microsoft’s seemingly schizophrenia approach to their office APIs (is it MFC? Win32? WinForms? XAML? UWP? Something else?) and their lack of focus or just the iPhone and mobile computing’s “halo” effect.

For me, Pinner's share extension blocks the app's UI while it's saving still in iOS 10.

This is unfortunate as I thought an iOS 10-only update was supposed to fix this. Goes to show that the Pinner developer doesn’t care about providing any support.

Instapaper used to feel like that when Marco still owned it. What is different to me is that because it was primarily an iOS-revenue driven app, it feel like it caught up in the Apple-inspired race to the bottom revenue-wise. Pinboard feels decidedly more indie-web and therefore perhaps less popular but more stable.

I've been using Pocket the last few months after having used Instapaper for a few years.

For iOS, I find the Instapaper app to be a lot better than Pocket. A ton of font options that don't rely upon paying the Premium subscription, and the UI is less obtrusive. I also like that when you share links from the Instapaper app, it sends the actual link. Pocket's app shares links as redirects, so everything shows up as a shorthand pocket.co/nnnnnn type of link. Both can have links added by an iOS share sheet, which is convenient. Pocket does have a nice feature in the app where it can refresh the article, in case you know what you're reading is outdate.

No Android devices, so no clue how it works on that platform.

The web experience is mostly equal, although Instapaper looks cleaner and still has more font options available than Pocket.

Neither platform is perfect with regards to transcribing articles. While I haven't done direct comparisons, it seems to me that Pocket falls back on displaying the original webpage more often when the site isn't a normal blog or news article. When it does transcribe the page down, it seems to include less non-article stuff(social media links, etc.) than Instapaper does. It seems to be a wash there.

For my own personal conclusion, I like Instapaper more, but Pocket works well enough.

Regarding accessibility aspects, Pocket provides a great "Listen" (Text to Speech) function (at least on iOS) with maximum speeds far faster than Instapaper. It's pretty much the biggest reason that I use Pocket.

A little late here, but the comment may be useful. I actively use both services (and Pinboard), but for different things. Pocket for me is "something is possibly interesting but I don't have time to work that out right now", Instapaper is a store of long form articles that I want to read (on tablet, Mac, phone or Kindle), and Pinboard is bookmarks.

The separation of concerns is useful for my mental model of what I intend to happen when I open each of these apps.

Pocket lacks the very useful send-to-kindle feature in Instapaper. Instapaper frequently fails to send images properly in their kindle digests, but it's still better than nothing (the key feature IMO). On the other hand, the Instapaper iOS app has some kind of problem with syncing, taking an inordinate amount of time to download a few articles (with the potential to ding you with substantial data costs if you open the app at the wrong time).

Pocket also doesn't have notes...

That is getting to be a major annoyance.

Just use wallabag. Its the FOSS / optionally self-hosted alternative. Haven't we learned what storing data in proprietary services leads to?

Very neat. I hadn't seen this before.

I found the general feature set to be similar, but Pocket has pretty decent article discovery/curation. I now use Pocket exclusively.

The only downside is that a decent chunk of their content (~5%) is from Business Insider, and there is no way to mute/hide a source (News Republic offers this). But they've got plenty of good sources (NYT, New Yorker), and a pretty good recommendation algorithm.

Not sure if you're talking about this but Pocket recently launched Pocket Explore - it's a little nicer than the "Recommended" tab in dashboard. https://www.getpocket.com/explore/

Also - If you're looking for discovery/curation then you'd probably be interested in what I'm doing - GGather.com. Right now it's in private beta - but you can join on https://beta.ggather.com

I've pretty much switched to Evernote. Its web clipping is pretty good. The pure reading experience is't as good as a dedicated program, but in return I use Evernote for more than just reading, and having the articles already in a "read later" notebook helps me keep the ones I want to keep. Note: I have a paid account so it downloads all my saved articles to my iPad.

Here's my specific use case: https://li.st/hlfcoding/instapaper-impressions-4vENbtbDKLetv...

I have been using raindrop.io for the past 6 months. I have nothing but good things to say about it.

Was a heavy Pocket user before that but their iPhone app was buggy in the sense that when I saved something from Safari to Pocket, sometimes it would save, other times it would not. It was literally hit or miss. Not sure if they have fixed that in a recent release or not.

I switched to Instapaper after a long time using Pocket. I think Instapaper's interface is better, and cleaner for reading (especially the web version). I also seem to remember Pocket's android app being slightly laggy, but I don't know if that's still the case.

just try a ifttt recipe to sync everything over from one to the next. with ifttt you can nearly do anything you want with both services.

I used Readability in the past and it works great! But then they too shut it down on Sept 30.

I like pocket a lot. Been using it casually for a few years.

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