All Pocket accounts will be converted to Firefox accounts | Hacker News Reader

All Pocket accounts will be converted to Firefox accounts

blog.mozilla.org

83 pointseurvin94 comments

At the dawn of browser sync technologies, it was possible to self host a Firefox sync server. I think I remember there was a component for authentication and one for storage proper. You could use each one of them, or both.

Is this still a thing? How would today's firefox handle a custom sync server?

As far as I know you can still self-host Firefox sync.

It'd handle it fine, considering that's still an option. The account hosting side of things is a little trickier but it's doable.

https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34674569

Theoretically - yes.

Practically, it's poorly documented clusterfuck of very confused technologies (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18448125). I hope they've possibly sorted that out over the years, but I don't have much hopes. Although they seem to went monorepo for FxA stuff (IIRC, it used to be that Accounts and Content services were separate). Still, no end-user docs - best you can get is assorted bunch of articles aimed at developers: https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel... - summing it up, it's a project that no one seem to have ever meant to be able to use outside of Mozilla, an ability to self-host it is an accident.

It used that one could've host a single simple program and have everything working. After switch to Firefox Accounts, trying to deploy all those services and their dependencies (and keeping up as it grew) quickly became complicated. I used to maintain my own half-assed almost-all-in-one re-implementation (https://gitlab.com/drdaeman/firesync, still required Kinto as a dependency), but I gave up.

Why don't they just use Nextcloud or SyncThing or similar for syncing? Too much wheel reinvention everywhere!

Even though I have a firefox account, I'm glad I have moved off Pocket (to Readwise Reader).

I don't want all my accounts joined. I don't want a threat model where being locked out of one service takes down everything, especially when that service has no support. This applies to gmail and Mozilla equally.

It will be $8 a month if you signup during the beta and pay yearly. Seems kinda steep if you're just using Pocket as a "read later" tool that scrapes the page.

Readwise is absolutely high end power user software, and not just a "read it later" service. If you need it's features, it's worth it. I really like all of my highlights syncing to my obsidian notes, the ability to use a single source for rss/epubs/webpages/pdf/etc and having an AI assistant to throw at tasks.

If you want a free, more direct pocket clone, check out wallabag: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

Alright, I interpreted their page as if it was a different service with a separate subscription.

Readwise looks really good, but I have a hard time understanding the value proposition. For the full application with the Readwise Reader it is 9 dollars a month. Then again its certainly worth more than a blue check-mark.

I recently switched after years of using Pocket. The first thing that made me switch was Pocket rebuilt their iOS app but with only a few of the features. Many things, such as highlighting, were left out and support says they will be built sometime later.

The second is the parsing seems to work much better.

Also, I can subscribe to RSS feeds or sign up to email newsletters so that they go directly to Readwise Reader.

Adding on to what other user said, Readwise has GPT summary option for every article, inbuilt natural language narrator, support for epub files, and lot more. You can also save individual highlights and notes with each save. They also have very responsive developers and a very handy newsletter they send to users to keep them apprised of what is happening behind the scenes. Not to mention a brilliant iOS app.

I don't see it either for 108 USD/year. I get that they need to pay for servers, for developers and etc, but I pay less for Spotify and somehow they manage to license vast amount of content.

Well, Spotify does it by underpaying artists.

Do Pocket/Mozilla have artists to pay?

Don't know. I'd think they pay the original sources. Agreed that the cost seems out of alignment, but they're also working with a much smaller user base than Spotify. A small profit margin on tens of millions of users gets you a lot more money than a small profit margin on tens of thousands (numbers made up). So maybe it's actually a very fair price and Spotify's is not, which we know it's not.

All Youtube and Gmail accounts will be converted to Google+ accounts...

That was my immediate reaction, too.

I guess for me the difference is that if my firefox account goes away tomorrow, it is an issue I can resolve by making a new one. It's annoying but it doesn't concern anyone but me.

Losing access to my gmail address because of some youtube fuckup, now there's something that disrupts my communications with others and is hard to recover from.

that's the Buzz I heard too! I guess it's the next Wave

ooooh BURN.

Browsers shouldn't have accounts to begin with.

Where does one store favorite links so I can handle them on phone and two separate machines?

You value the syncing browser accounts offer. Personally I like being able to go between several of my own computers and not have all settings synced. It's not a fresh slate situation but it is a bit freeing to not carry all my digital baggage all the time.

Good for you. Firefox accounts are optional.

Indeed. I happen to know this because I use Firefox on a daily basis and have never once been pestered to use one.

So a browser with accounts works for you. So your comment was irrelevant.

Wow, you sure got me. You want a medal or something?

On your ftp account, where else?

I prefer to telnet it over with a bespoke protocol loosely based on gopher.

Hold on, let me spin up my IMP nodes first.

that sounds like the lazy guy's way of doing it.

What can I say, the product guys have gotten to me. This was an MVP approach.

Yeah, real nerds build their own router for maximum bespokeness.

Wonderful comment. Thanks : - )

This niche use case which offers a marginal benefit even to those who want it, is a laughable mask for the assembly and deployment of one of the world's largest data harvesting networks, the browser 'sync' account

On your personal homepage's bookmarks page.

What about bookmarks that I don’t necessarily want to be publicly known. Not even talking about anything potentially embarrassing. Things like where I bank or my doctor’s appointment booking page.

Presumably that's a small set of bookmarks which you could manage across devices.

Other options might be to have that personal homepage on a non-public machine (e.g., on your home or office LAN), behind a VPN, and/or password protected.

Another practice from days of yore was to export specific bookmarks and transfer those to other systems. This is indeed cumbersome with mobile browsers (I'm not sure these even offer bookmark import/export ... Looks as if that's synch-only for Firefox/Android, which is disappointing.

I just use my domain with a simple frontend for links

> Where does one store favorite links so I can handle them on phone and two separate machines?

Linkding: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

Linkding is great, and has some browser extensions to inject your favourites into relevant search pages on the likes of google, ddg, bing, etc, which was a nice idea I hadn't considered before

I'm using raindrop.io. So far, even the free tier works well for me.

Browsers shouldn't require accounts, and thankfully Firefox doesn't. But having a way to synchronize my passwords across all my devices is pretty important.

They had an implementation that did not require any accounts. They deemed that it's too confusing for users* to scan some QR codes (or type a bunch of characters), so they went with an account-based system.

*) Or whatever the real reason was. It was about time Mozilla started to have management issues so I absolutely won't be surprised if the goal was to "become an ecosystem" or "gather a userbase" (or whatever is management speak for forcing people to sign up).

> scan some QR codes

How is that not still an account? What definition of account are we working with here?

It depends how you define an account. Is an account an email? Is an account an id in a database? An IP? You can't sync anything without an "account"

Maybe it was using technology similar to magic wormhole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G3_Xa1GBTs

https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

Sure, strictly speaking, of course there were accounts as in "database records". However, users gave no details about themselves, and haven't signed up for anything. No long-term credentials, just a rendezvous point.

You used to just open two Firefoxes, start sync setup on the one, copy (or scan) a code to another - boom, done, they're talking to each other.

That’s what a password manager is for

Does your password manager require an account to sync between multiple machines?

I like that my browser (Vivaldi, Brave) has accounts so my phone, desktop (2x OS), and laptop (2x OS) are always completely in sync, with no downgraded functionality if I choose to not use an account.

Brave doesn’t have accounts, for privacy reasons. You sync via a.. private E2E (don’t know what else to call it) group you join via a key phrase.

It’s pretty easy to see a use case for a work account and a personal account - or accounts for five different users of a shared home computer.

For a while there was an announcement that pocket would stop working on kobo devices, due to this announcement. But now it seems kobo will be given an extension and will make their pocket integration work with Firefox accounts.

I already killed my pocket account and switched to self-hosted wallabag when I saw they were killing off Kobo integration.

But does wallabag work with Kobo's default firmware?

No but KOreader on Kobo has it. Works flimsy at best though.

This sounds like a good thing imo. Pocket is a great tool that should be fully integrated

Well, it sounds like it's still going to have extensions for all the other browsers. Im not sure if the integration is changing other than the auth method to pocket.

I'd rather it not become any more integrated, I just want to browse the web and use extensions for additions like this.

What's there to integrate, really? You click a button, the URL of your current opened page is transmitted to their service along with your user ID, they scrape the page content, and voila.

pocket is a... well, it's a tool anyway, that never should have been anything but an add-on. Including it in the browser was one of the biggest signs that firefox was willing to sacrifice their user's privacy and security for revenue. If people are fine with telling Pocket what they read and letting them push related ads at them all day they should absolutely have that choice, but it should never have been shoved on everyone.

Firefox Sync already had a Reading List which was encrypted and open source, they really didn't need to bundle a third-party proprietary cloud service that required an account and increased attack surface (https://web.archive.org/web/20150818175419/https://www.gnu.g...). People who wanted pocket, and found it valuable would still be just as well off with it as an add-on, everyone else would have been spared the extra trouble of disabling it.

Firefox is still the best browser in terms of privacy and security but only after you make an ever growing number of about:config changes, many of which exist only to remove or disable anti-features added by Mozilla. I really wish Mozilla would embrace privacy, security, and customization as what (apart from the rendering engine, which most users will never be aware of) truly differentiates them from chrome and every other popular browser which are also chrome, but again and again their choices are in direct opposition to those very same principles

> If people are fine with telling Pocket what they read

I don't believe the ads shown in Firefox require sending any browsing history to the web (whether to Firefox or anyone else). The mechanism used here is different. I do agree with you that pushing ads into the browser chrome by default is abhorrent (a judgment compounded with the fact that they initially pretended that these weren't ads).

Saving pages to Pocket tells Mozilla what you read though. Reading List did not.

The implication of the first paragraph was that this behavior applied to users by default. If it's effectively opt-in, it's hard to argue that this is Mozilla "willing to sacrifice their user's privacy and security" and that "telling Pocket what they read" was "shoved on everyone", if in fact it is a choice to have your browsing history sent to Mozilla.

Replacing a privacy compatible feature with a revenue generating privacy incompatible sacrificed privacy for revenue. And what you called the implication was your inference.

Pocket was a great tool until the released a new iOS app the other month. The app has only a fraction of the features in the prior app.

I have a script that runs in the background and exports my bookmarks, merges them with the existing file, then syncs that file over Syncthing.

I am not sharing my bookmarks with Mozilla, I am way too smart for that.

I think maybe this would be finally the year I stop paying for Pocket.

It kinda worked to quickly save items but I have always wanted it to be better at organizing items. Tagging is a hassle and even though it has suggested tags most of the time they are not useful, and also you have to apply them individually!

Lately they added Lists, which I don't know how is different from pinned tags, adding more confusion.

Also I am not really sure, but I think the search functionality don't work reliably.

I just hope wallabag or Matter don't just let my unreaded links rot.

I used it for synchronizing web series to my Kobo reader, and indeed the lack of proper organization makes large amounts of items a very tedious task.

I love Pocket.

It's the only bookmarking tool I ever stuck with.

I also use Firefox as my main browser.

I want to love Pocket, but I just can’t. Every time I open it, all I see is a lot of work that past me wanted future me to do. I’ve stopped using it because I’m trying to be kinder to future me.

I've loved Pocket as well, but I didn't like paying $45 a year for it. It was more of a bookmarking service for me than an actual read-it-later site. Now that I've found Raindrop.io, which works fine for me on the free tier, I can save a little money and have better organization than Pocket gave me.

Seems like pocket is losing a lot of its value due to more sites not working with its article view. I've stopped using it because of that and also because it doesn't work well for pages that aren't articles and I didn't like having to maintain multiple bookmarking tools.

That being said, if it was more integrated with Firefox and Firefox's bookmarking tools, that might make it compelling for me again, so maybe this is a good thing....

I hate the way pocket was just plonked in as a feature i never wanted along side a bunch of splash screens.

Gits

I was also upset at that, but I decided to give Pocket a go. it wasn't bad. and then they changed it so that the Pocket section of the home screen couldn't be collapsed, and it became a problem. see I want it to be there as an option, but I wanted it collapsed by default - otherwise, it's too distracting when I'm just opening a new tab to search for something. so I disabled Pocket and don't use it anymore.

Gits

When reading your replies I choose to think that “gits” is hacker news slang for using git to check out the source code, patch the offending behaviour, and compile it yourself.

Moved to Matter - https://hq.getmatter.com - never looked back.

What do you like about it?

And they almost fubar'd the Pocket integration witht the Kobo eReaders in the process.

Hey Mozilla, have you considered that maybe I don't want to open an account?

In fact I don't want to open accounts with anyone. Not with social media, not with newspapers, certainly not newsletters. Accounts allow better tracking that cookies, and cookies are now regulated.

If a web site tries to get me to open an account, it will reflect poorly on my view of them, and I will be less inclined to come back.

I only opened an account here after years of lurking and trust building and I still only log on if I want to comment or upvote something.

> In fact I don't want to open accounts with anyone

Then it's not and issue for you, as you probably didn't want to open an account with pocket in first place, right?

>> In fact I don't want to open accounts with anyone

>Then it's not and issue for you, as you probably didn't want to open an account with pocket in first place, right?

Then it's not an issue for you, as you probably didn't want him to want to open an account with pocket in the first place in the first place, right?

Sometimes one gets tired of endless complaining.

I have been iMessaging myself as my read it later methodology. It has worked quite very well for me.

I’ve done the same with Signal’s Note to Self.

This is disappointing. I love Pocket but I don't trust Mozilla, I will not use a Firefox account, and this ends my subscription.

lol, I see this the other way around;

Cheers to consumer choice!

Pocket has been owned by Mozilla since 2017; why didn’t you end your subscription then?

Because it was just owned then, I disagree with further integration.

But if you don't trust Mozilla, what made you think that further integration wasn't already going on without you knowing?

Pocket has been integrated into Mozilla for quite a while. Your efforts are either misplaced or extremely late.

Boy, the lack of self-awareness in this response is something.

Semi-annual PSA: Pocket was supposed to have been open sourced when Mozilla bought them out. Spoiler alert: it isn't. On the other hand, maybe we should give the parties involved the benefit of the doubt. These things take time, after all—the change in ownership was only announced in 2017.

(Perhaps the person you're responding to has a perspective on tardiness that has been influenced by Mozilla Corporation's relationship with the concept.)

fxa auth is superior to pocket auth

Reply on news.ycombinator.com