I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription | Hacker News Reader

I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription

notes.kateva.org

192 pointsleotravis1096 comments

If anyone is interested into self-hosting their bookmarks service so that they don't suffer this again. Here is a list of interesting open source projects that provides that

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

- Linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden

- Servas https://github.com/beromir/Servas

- Grimoire https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire

- Hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder

- LinkAce https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/

- Readeck https://readeck.org/en/

- Shaarli https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

- Shirori https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

I have been using Espial: https://github.com/jonschoning/espial

Worth mentioning is https://www.wallabag.it/en

I love linkding. It archives bookmarks so you have a snapshot for the eventual link rot of the future.

Happy user of Linkding here (wish it had a different name that wasn't one syllable away from LinkedIn).

Linkding: I self-host and the developer has been very receptive and open minded about feature requests.

Pinboard: I moved after Maciej asked existing subscribers for donations so he could hire somebody to keep it running and then... didn't. I'm not saying he used that money to do some travelling, but it certainly looked that way to me.

I started another just last week: https://github.com/sumnerjj/bookmarkstorage2

I asked him for my full archive download in October 2022, and having heard nothing back I wound up paying him another $39 to keep my archive from being deleted while I tried to get his attention.

I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January".

I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.

Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.

Same thing happened to me around that same time.

I've been pretty happy with raindrop.io ever since.

Raindrop is the GOAT - I backup my links to a Google Sheet with IFTTT just in case but I LOVE Raindrop. (I use the Pro plan)

Many low hanging fruit. I guess many feels the same about support.

If Maciej is burnt out then I wonder why he hasn't hired someone to do support for him?

I don’t think he’s burned out. I think he’s just an asshole.

Yeah he's just making enough money that he doesn't care anymore. He is aware of how many people are confused about the lack of support and has commented about it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31186755.

Yep. He has demonstrated it repeatedly in pinbiard threads here.

At one time he asked all existing subscribers for donations to enable him to pay a Romanian programmer to maintain the site. People paid and then he used the money for something else other than employing somebody to maintain the site. Not cool. Ref: https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/161007608301301350...

Oh, I had a similar experience - need to ping him again.

Yup also happened to me in 2018. I never received a download link for my archive. My support email was never answered and my archive expired and was deleted.

For people who didn't read the linked article: Pinboard is not shutting down, just the OP is tired with outages and unresponsiveness of the owner.

Yeah I was confused by that too, so have replaced the title with more representative language from the article body.

I have requested my full archive download a couple of times over the last year and haven't been able to get it, which stinks. I keep trying to figure out a migration plan, but it seems daunting, especially with so many archived bookmarks. I love the service and want to keep using it, but the inability to get a backup archive makes me nervous.

Yep, stopped working for me years ago. Had to contact The Guy personally every single time, because my archive grew to 20GB. He’s not responsive for years tho :(

How are others storing their bookmarks now? I've moved to Google Sheets for some cases, but it's much less powerful

Raindrop is fantastic: https://raindrop.io/.

$28/year, also "AI Suggestions" is the first item on the "Pro" features list.

I'm sure it's a fine CRUD app but I don't really hold hope for it being a long term success.

This app added this AI feature recently. It is very successful for years before current LLM hype.

Raindrop is not a new app. I've been using it for about five years now.

It's a solo developer project by one guy in Kazakhstan, which makes it all the more impressive. It has a great browser extension, a great desktop app (Electron-based, but very well done), and a great iOS mobile app (no idea about Android). It's also been under active development since I started using it.

One of its best features is its app, which allows you to browse your bookmarks in a split pane.

I've only checked out the AI feature now, since you mentioned it. I'm not a fan of pointless AI features that get added to apps, but this one is actually useful! It suggests places your bookmarks should be moved to. I had a bunch of stuff in an "Unsorted" folder, and it actually made really accurate suggestions for where they should be moved, and it also suggested moving some stuff I had miscategorized or where I had a more specific folder it could be in.

Honestly that's a rare good use case for AI: low stakes, passes through a human before anything actually happens, and is about ambiguos categorization based on human language.

Agreed!

I can vouch for that. I have been using it for many years.

I migrated from pinboard to raindrop this year, can confirm.

I was on Pinboard's lifetime plan. No subscription, just a single payment of $15 back who knows when. A few years ago I was asked if I wouldn't rather pay $5 per month instead, and declined. I wonder if all the outages and throttling were a result of underestimating the running costs.

Regardless, service quality had declined to such levels that I switched to raindrop this year. Ironically, raindrop is free to use, and may run into the same issue eventually.

I got the same e-mail and also declined to move off the lifetime plan. I would have considered it to support the site but I could see where the owner's attention was going to be focused. Politics is a hell of a drug.

I also migrated from Pinboard to Raindrop and can confirm it's a great service, is updated regularly and while I've generally not received quick responses to questions or feedback, I do eventually. It's also worth mentioning that at least for iOS and MacOS, it has nice integrations that work well, which I could never say about Pinboard.

Homebuilt tool. Started when the Pocket BS in FF happened, just kept playing with it. It's a PWA/Share Target on mobile and an extension in my browser.

Downside is I have to be online to use it.

I got Anybox[0] with the lifetime subscription (40$) and have been happy with it (Only for Apple devices unfortunately)

I can choose to automatically download a web archive when I bookmark. Also has a trial version. Can be a bit overwhelming to set things up. But works seamlessly once done.

[0] https://anybox.app/

Zotero with the browser plugin

I’d never considered using a reference manager for bookmarks but looking at the feature set, it’s kinda perfect

Firefox native bookmarks

I self host with linkding[1].

[1]: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

My password manager doubles as my bookmark manager. I mean, it's already doing the one job on it's way to doing the other, so..

What do you do with, say, an article linked from HN that you want to refer to in future?

Copy link, create new site in pw manager, give it a memorable name, potentially put it into a folder or a collection.

Tons easier than farting around with a google spreadsheet 8I

FWIW, Pinboard's founder is still actively commenting (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords) on HN as of 7 days ago.

Ah, thanks! Gonna ping him to allow me to download my pin archive :)

He's also somewhat active on twitter: https://x.com/pinboard

I was a previous Pinboard customer. I've since moved to Linkding[0], a self-hosted solution, and highly recommend it. It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard but gives me much more confidence about the longevity of my bookmarks.

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

Hopefully coming soon to your favourite distro: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/341665 :)

> It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard

Internally, perhaps, but it doesn't have external feature parity when it comes to, e.g., being able to automagically import things using IFTTT.

(Yes, I could probably lash up a webhook feeding into linkding but IFTTT's webhook support still isn't great but I'm already 20 projects behind on my personal list and redoing all my IFTTT recipes that talk to Pinboard isn't going to be a priority.)

Linkding is definitely worth a look though as backup.

It was murky but I did appreciate that they took over del.icio.us and sort of half made it available again. Regardless, a legend in the game.

It really depends on your needs. I use Pinboard on many different browsers and devices and I'm not really interested in running my own service. I'll happily pay for the full text archiving but I acknowledge it is not perfect. I have come to the conclusion if you want to retain full text copies of your bookmarks, you need to download the pages yourself. I have been using SingleFile extension but there is also a CLI available.

What have you been using for search? The CLI app? What is your download workflow like? Is there an automated way to download a bunch of links, say pulled in from an API?

I don't have nearly as sophisticated setup as [Gwern](https://gwern.net/archiving), but they provide an overview of how you might go about it. Right now I manually use the extension on as as needed basis, but I would like to get it to the point where I can point a script at a list of urls and both run SingleFile and also upload to the Wayback Machine

Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of "Don't be a free user" (1) is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it's in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn (2)). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn't sustain itself.

It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to market forces and operational challenges.

Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.

(1) https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

(2) https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+pinboard

> Wow, the irony is Pinboard [...] is now shutting down.

Where are you seeing that?

Pinboard isn't shutting down.

Is Pinboard actually closing? There’s nothing to indicate that on the site’s blog or its Twitter[2] (which had a post four days ago).

[1]: https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ [2]: https://x.com/Pinboard

Every paid service shuts down eventually.

Who said it's shutting down?

It could also be that maciej has enough paying users that he can afford to coast and be unresponsive, losing some users in the process, in order to do whatever else he's doing these days.

The about page says 30,000 active users; most must be paying since there is no free service it seems (though there used to be way back in the day; I used it myself). If half of those are paying, that's $330K a year. Not bad.

Perhaps decaying is the right term

From his past posts it seemed he had gotten involved in politics; that may have taken some of his attention away from pinboard.

I paid $11 once, decades ago.

nice screed, but it's hard for me to make sense of it as a paying and satisfied user.

similarly it's hard for me to make sense of "this paid service failed, so it's a proof of a failing concept.", given the sheer amount of successful paid services out there.

I mean.. we would be here all day if we were listing the past failures of free services on the net -- what's the point?

Could success perhaps be a bit more complex than whether or not you charge a monthly fee alone?

my takeaway : running a low/no-staff service is hard, and people will perceive any possible gap in customer service as "in freefall", even though everyone is well aware of the human condition.

I used pinboard for years until I started saving web pages as PDFs in my Dropbox folder. I got the idea from pinboard’s own archive feature.

there are plenty of good alternatives nowadays:

- https://raindrop.io/: Also a one-man show, but probably the best bookmarking tool out there.

- https://omnivore.app: Open source and support for newsletters.

For my use case though (I like to curate and share), I ended up building an app (https://fika.bar) to bundle bookmarking + RSS Reader + Blogging.

Yours look great, you should have a demo though.

Yees, I was also missing being able to picture it in my head.

good advice! I will try recording something :)

Check out Shaarli if you are open to self hosted options.

Like pinboard it feels old but in a good way (aka it is light on resources and has a limited featureset). However, I will say that I do not care to archive pages and just use the wayback machine for dead links instead.

I'm going to guess pinboard isn't dead, it's just been on the backburner. Idlewords (i.e. maciej) still comments on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords

Pinboard is Maciej Ceglowski's only visible source of income but he seems to be having jerkbrain troubles (moving from the open web to Twitter makes those worse, kids, don't do that)

1. depression sucks 2. don't go on Twitter kids, it always ends badly 3. trusting a company with a bus factor of 1 is always risky

It was a surprise to me to discover that Maciej is actually the author behind the idlewords blog. He published this in May of this year: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

to anyone else interested in the topic I've found this video useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIUrvoIdsU0

I still use pinboard every week. I also find it very interesting to follow what other people are pinning. There aren't many niche places to follow ONLY the notable links of other hackers.

I barely use it but when I do need to look something up it’s great. But conscious that it’s not super robust, I simply save bookmarks in Zotero now and that works even better on all counts.

I’m frankly impressed by how many people still use Pinboard! Like, when I pin some recent niche news article, Pinboard shows that other tens of people already did the same…

I still use it all the time and have been quite happy with it. I don't do the full-text archiving, though -- never been of interest to me.

I think I paid $5-10 for this as a one-time fee in December 2010. It was one of the best purchases ever. However, by mid-2022, I noticed issues, downtime, weird errors, etc., so I exported and moved on to raindrop.io after emailing support@pinboard.in and not hearing back.

I had to text him one to get Pinboard back up! He did say thanks. But, really, should he have known!?

I'm using bookmarkos.com and it serves my needs. The dev is responsive too.

Re: alternatives, there's also Linkhut: https://ln.ht/

The most I know about this company is the entertaining way in which he demonstrated that Hacker News polls for "who should we fund?" are going to have the same incentives as ones on Reddit. Good times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270

I thought it was really funny. You can't really ask a crowd where to put your money. They'll operate on their own incentives, not yours. And then get pissed off when you don't play along. The classic principal-agent problem but the agents are a mob.

Did Pinboard get bombed by HN?

> Error: Connection refused

check out Sublime - www.sublime.app - simple, beautiful, and communal, so you can discover the cool stuff other ppl are saving too.

Obligatory mention of https://raindrop.io/

I switched from Pinboard a year or more ago after using it for many years, mainly because I found the iPhone app and integration (eg share feature, to save bookmarks) to be flaky.

Raindrop has been great - imported seamlessly from Pinboard and the iPhone and Desktop app work well for me.

Ouch, I never knew my Pinboard data is at risk. Terrifying.

I too was a refugee from del.icio.us and signed up for ~$11 a year. I also declined the offer to "support" the platform for more $. One thing I DO like is the popular tab, I've found a ton of cool resources there. Just sayin.

I was early to sign up for pinboard, got the lifetime subscription at $11

I received an email from them asking me to move to a yearly subscription, although I could choose to decline

I chose to decline, mostly glad about the decision, I paid what was asked when I originally signed up

Same here. Any time I get annoyed with the site problems I just remind myself I paid once years ago and the site works 99% of the time.

I think if I was paying $20/year I would be really annoyed and have moved elsewhere years ago.

I decided to pay for 3 years to give myself enough runway to not think about it, I have 9 months left. So I guess I'm giving up and switching to self hosted.

Same with me but I chose to switch to the yearly subscription. I basically got ignored just the same.

I use Raindrop.io for now.

Maciej is aware of the outrage, if you can call it that. He seems rather hostile to those angry customers.

My hunch is that he got bored with Pinboard and plans to ignore it until it dies. Or breaks and then he does the minimum viable to get it duct taped again.

I personally like Maciej but just telling it like it is.

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