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.
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)
Other than that, it works pretty well with most text-based content. I'm using it through the Android app occasionally, and while the app won't win any design awards, it serves it's purpose.
But the state of the iOS app is, well, not great. Clunky design, with odd syncing. Which is unfortunate as 99% of my use case is reading it on my phone whenever I’m waiting for something.
On the scale of years, products fail, get bought, are unmaintained, become too expensive, etc... An export of your database is always a hassle to manage, and you must hope there will be an importer for the next product that will also fail a few years down the road.
On the other hand, files have always been there and will always be there. Epub is a standard-enough format that will live. The highest piece of complexity is syncthing, which can be easily replaced the day it doesn't work anymore. Bonus: I have all my data offline so I don't need connectivity, and I lower my environmental impact.
Too often products feel like a reinvention of the whole stack because it's easier to sell, rather than reusing proven tools and using them the way they were supposed to be used.
Not sure if it currently does all you'd want, but the founders are responsive on email so perhaps worth asking for any features that you'd like them to add!
If you want to save the entire snapshot of the web page for archival and references purpose, I think zotero is a good choice. But it's not a good read-it-later product.
It doesn't have fancy graphical previews and stuff like that, but it works and archives page contents for an extra fee.
GoodLinks if you only use Apple and value privacy.
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.
I've wondered about how to exfiltrate all of my accumulated links I've put into Pocket over the past ~7 years or so.
Yeah, this is what has prevented me from moving away. I was a premium user and used to use their search. I’m not anymore but I still want to keep the list around. I still go back and find references that Google doesn’t show anymore.
There are some apps that move data from pocket to kindle or such, but having an import from pocket in a new product would be really nice.
And Pocket keeps having trouble with doing reader mode with sites in 2022 and thus can’t do highlights.