No Longer Posting to Pinboard | Hacker News Reader

No Longer Posting to Pinboard

gyford.com

51 pointsslater86 comments

The design of Pinboard exists in a similar but self hosted service called linkding [1]. I've been self hosting with Docker for a few years with no issues I can recall. Just checked and it does have the responsive forms as well.

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

Cool! Is there a straightforward way to import your Pinboard?

Not the one you replied to, but I can check later if I don't forget, but I happily switched to linkding (without importing) and I don't miss anything.

Yes, if you count the export from Pinboard to Bookmark.html and then import to Linkding for once.

One weird thing though is, that Linkding does not have marking a bookmark "read" on first click: This is the most useful feature on Pinboard for me.

Via the pinboard-bookmarklet I pile all the links I come across, then mass read them and can track what's been read because the first click marks them on Pinboard.

Pinboard: Settings -> Backup -> "HTML (legacy Netscape format almost everyone can read)"

Linkding: Settings -> General -> Import "Import bookmarks and tags in the Netscape HTML format. This will execute a sync where new bookmarks are added and existing ones are updated."

The stuff in quotes is verbatim from the admin panels, I have not tried it.

Oh, wow, I just installed it on my server, and it's great (づ ◕‿◕ )づ

Thank you! Linkding has everything I wanted from Pinboard (a bit nicer interface :)). I just set it up, imported everything from Pinboard, and will probably be happy.

Ooh it's on Pikapods, too! I'll give it a try. :)

I stopped paying (and using it) a couple of years ago. I have a lifetime account so my bookmarks are still there.

Reason: I had started paying yearly for the archive option and it stopped working and I tried and failed several times to get in contact with support.

I now use raindrop.io, it is reasonably priced, has api, lets me import pinboard bookmarks, and unlike pinboard.in it still works for me.

> Reason: I had started paying yearly for the archive option and it stopped working and I tried and failed several times to get in contact with support.

Same. Archival stopped working, got a bunch of very confrontative replies from the admin and felt it wasn't worth my time to argue with him.

By the way, didn't notice that raindrop.io started offering a permanent library. That's great. I wish ReadKit supported it too. (Pocket permanent library had the very same issue a long time ago, I stopped using it for this reason).

Is there any tool to migrate from pinboard to raindrop while keeping all the tags and permanent pages stored at the time it was saved?

It's a shame there isn't more of an open community around pinboard. Some time ago, I tried to get an answer about a very basic API detail (the format of a token, IIRC) and couldn't get it. I love the site itself, but I've been motivated to move off to my own local system for a while—and I'm slowly doing just that!

Good point but for me, ultimately it wouldn't help.

There is something that stopped working on the server side that only the dev (devs?) can fix and my requests kept getting ignored despite the fact that I was a paying customer (both lifetime and later recurring on top).

> Archival stopped working, got a bunch of very confrontative replies from the admin

I didn't even get that as far as I could see.

> Is there any tool to migrate from pinboard to raindrop while keeping all the tags

Yes, it is built in and happens automatically during onboarding if you allow it.

> and permanent pages stored at the time it was saved?

Not as far as I know.

It did try to create new snapshots as it ingested my bookmarks but for many sites it was too late, they were gone.

I’m a huge fan of Pinboard owner’s talk on website obesity [1], and I like the brutal minimalistic look, so I’ve wanted to try it out for a while now. I am having second thoughts now: no responsive styles, even for the one feature your users are likely to be using on the go, is pretty frustrating at least.

[1]: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

I would also like there to be an official mobile app for saving links, and browser extensions that actually work and reliably save the pages. I like Maciej, but not adding these in the past like 7 years feels more lazy than minimalistic to me :/.

The Chrome extension was last updated a month ago. The whole site went quietly responsive over the last two years. I beg people to align their criticism with reality.

I plead guilty to not building a mobile app, because I don't know how to build mobile apps. Right now I'm trying to kick a better API version out the door so that more capable people than me can.

Thank you for a quick reply! You are right, I didn't notice the responsiveness, my bad!

As for the Chrome extension, I had to use an alternative one, because the official one cannot be configured to have a single click to save - it shows up a menu from which I always need to pick one of similarly sounding options having to do with saving. I'd love to be able to disable the features I don't want, and have the tool lead directly to save if that's the only feature I have left working.

As for the mobile (iOS), the situation is really bleak, as most of the iOS apps seem to be abandoned, and the only one that seems to work fine for saving (Pins) has a weird way of syncing that only syncs up some number of latest pins, and then only being able to offer tags that are among those. This results in the app not offering the tags I am sure I have, and me mistyping them, and then making a mess in my tags.

Tbh, I have multiple times considered spending a day with Cline/Cursor to make a simple save-only iOS app, but then I always thought - wait, isn't that what I am paying a yearly subscription for?

So, for me, paths to saving (= main use case of Pinboard for me) are clunky on both browser and phone I use :/.

I don't want to hate, but talking in Kano model terms, while I really appreciate Pinboard being a stable and reliable service, over time these paper cuts shifted from nice to haves into a missing basic needs, which cause me to look into alternatives.

This is very useful feedback, thank you!

For the Chrome extension, I started by just getting compliant with manifest v3, so Chrome would stop complaining. But now that it's relatively fresh in my mind, I'm going to redesign it so that the most common case (save this page) is one-click.

I think the reason a lot of the mobile apps suck is that the API is underpowered to do what those apps need. Once I get the v2 API out the door, if it turns out that no one wants to build a proper modern app on it, I'll roll up my sleeves and do it myself. But getting that new API stable and running is top priority.

I would love to hear your thoughts about what a minimalist 'save only' iOS app should behave like, either here or at support@pinboard.in.

Thank you, will write!

Btw, if you haven't yet tried Cline or some similar 'agent-like' developer environment, definitely do - I found it's great for doing easy work (on smaller projects) in a fields in which I don't have enough knowledge about eg. extension APIs, but I know enough about principles and web technologies to give a good code review. I imagine it could make adapting the Chrome extension much easier.

The whole site is responsively styled; I'm confused about why OP says otherwise.

I like the fact that there are no new features. The service is mature and doesn't need any changes. Also I use a bookmarklet on mobile (in a more easily-customized iOS browser called iCab), so I have no problems with responsive styling. Sometimes a minimum amount of effort is needed to make a service work the way you want it.

For a while a few years ago the service was unstable, but I haven't noticed any problems recently.

Have no recall of the service-owner's politics - but I do remember he is somewhat 'mercurial' in his emotions - and I've often wondered whether he will just decide to shutdown without warning.

Otherwise the service is minimal, no-nonsense, and no hassle. I don't get this post at all.

Pinboard has been up and running for 15 years. How many more years would I need to run the site before you'd decide I'm not going to shut it on a whim? Because I'll totally do that, just going on impulse right now.

IIRC you described it at some point as "business performance art", and may I please take this opportunity to thank you for creating this lens from which I have been able to view, understand, and not become infuriated at the last decade of hype-driven startups.

If you need any assistance with your infra stuff I'm happy to help.

Thank you; I really appreciate that!

> I’ve also had some issues in the past with the owner of Pinboard. I can’t recall the exact details of their political or other thoughts now, and don’t plan to look for them, but the site fell into my mental bucket of “services to reluctantly not recommend” a while back.

> Mental note: I need a bigger bucket.

This section really makes the author come across as "a hater", specially the last sentence. Like those people you meet that have a problem with everything. I'm being just a hater myself I guess. I never thought I needed to know the politics of the guy who delivers my mail so I also don't really care who made a website. Am I just too careless?

If you spent money on a service you do not really need it matters, or at least it should be easy to see how it might matter. Continuing the payment and usage starts to be something of a social connection or a sign of support. More so if it is a one person enterprise. If it then becomes obvious that support might be misplaced separation is the logical step.

Big organisations are a different thing. And you can't pick your mail guy, plus the mail service is faceless as a whole. But think Tesla, there similar mechanisms make buying a car from them quite unattractive now.

Over one you have agency over the other you don’t.

> This section really makes the author come across as "a hater", specially the last sentence. Like those people you meet that have a problem with everything.

Personally, it's just extremely hard to get me to recommend anything.

I use ubuntu+nvidia as my daily driver, at home and at work. But would I recommend it? Well....

The author edited his post with a follow-up.

  [Update (2025-02-12): This post, which I thought of as a hasty update to the handful of people who followed my links, was posted to Hacker News for some reason. Yes, I should have provided evidence for the above judgment had I thought more people would read it. As ever, use your own judgment for these things.]

It covers the author's pre-judgement; he admits he didn't put in the work and he tells us to use our judgement and not his.

The part that's not addressed is "I want to reluctantly recommend even less services(/people?)." An eagerness to detract may not be hate but we're right to be wary of it.

> Why pay for a service, and have the little mental overhead of it existing, when I’ve duplicated it on my own site?

For me, because Pinboard has IFTTT integration where I can feed a whole bunch of things[0] into it automagically. None of the self-hosted services has IFTTT integration or, as far as I've seen thus far, webhook functionality I could feed from IFTTT[1].

I've got a self-made feed from Pinboard to a self-hosted linkhut which works fine (absent the archiving capability but I've never really used that anyway.)

[0] Although sadly that list does keep shrinking as arseholes close off / commercialise their APIs.

[1] A REST API doesn't work because they rely on setting the 'Authorisation' header which, AFAIK, isn't supported in IFTTT's webhook.

Hi, linkhut dev here.

Just wanted to call out that linkhut does have IFTTT integration [0]. Although you will need to pay for an IFTTT developer account if you want to enable that on your self hosted instance. If you need help setting that up let me know, I’ll be happy to walk you through the process (and that way I can write documentation on how to do it).

Edit: I also was under the impression that one could use the webhooks integration [1] to make bespoke integrations (as the documentation says they support passing arbitrary request headers) but haven’t tried it myself, have you tried it and run into any issues? I’d also be happy to help improving support for that workflow.

[0] https://ifttt.com/linkhut

[1] https://help.ifttt.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010230347-Webhoo...

I have been using Pinboard for ages (14k links so far).

I appreciate that it remains unchanged. Many other services have deteriorated over time in their pursuit of "social engagement".

The ability to publicly display my links is useful, though I mainly use it for proactive sharing rather than being discovered.

Pinboard is social in an introvert's way - compared to other platforms that are social like street salesmen soliciting attention.

People should use whatever site they find most useful. But I find the specific criticisms here baffling. To wit:

* "The site has barely changed in years/decades". That's kind of the point of the site! People ancient enough to remember Pinboard origins know that I cloned it off of del.icio.us after Yahoo made that site useless through repeated redesigns. The value proposition of Pinboard is that it endures, just like the stuff you archive there.

* The "add URL form is not responsive". I fixed this in early January, along with a raft of other updates targeted at phone users, as the author himself acknowledges. I've been working to get things looking neater on phones for a while now; bug reports about this are especially welcome.

* They don't like me and my politics are bad, for reasons they can't remember or articulate.

Again, you can dislike me and my website for any reason you want, but if you're going to publicly attack my livelihood, do it with more substance.

Agreed. The post is less critique than a weird traipse through the author's head. I can't tell why the post ended up on HN; the post doesn't even contain information on how the author built their new solution.

> I can't tell why the post ended up on HN

Me neither.

I agree, the OP served a nothingburger. That and your reply made me want to check out Pinboard now.

I joined Pinboard at a time when there was no recurring costs, just a small fee to join, for life. I think I paid $10 total, 12 or 15 years ago, and not a penny since. For that amount it's a pretty good deal.

I loved that earlier pricing model, where the cost increased with each sign-up. It may not have been sustainable in the long-term, but it was an interesting attempt to do something different.

I think I got a couple sternly worded emails that sounded like "I can't make you pay, but you should pay now".

It was a single email, in 2022, and the wording was exceptionally friendly!

(For those who don't know, the site moved to a subscription model in 2015 and I asked old-timers to consider converting their account voluntarily. Everyone who chose not to still has a lifetime membership to the site.)

I am sorry if I misinterpreted this - I guess it's subjective. I'm not going to dig through old mails now but I'll take your word for it.

Thanks for that!

I think a lot of people write their own bookmarking application in IT. I did. I like Pinboard's lean style; I hope to restyle my application to something similar.

Why did you start using Pinboard in the first place?

For me, it was a delicio.us replacement

Did you think previously it was worth $22 p/a?

I would recommend anyone who likes using Pinboard take a look at Aboard built by Paul Ford’s company. I use it almost daily.

I was lucky to get in early and buy a lifetime perpetual account, otherwise I probably wouldn't still use it.

Wild, that its been 15+ years since then. The price model was "it gets more expensive (the one time price) the more people join". I think it was less than 20 dollars for me, even way less.

FWIW I migrated ~70k Pinboard pins to Raindrop.io without a hitch.

https://urligram.com here, del.icio.us-like social bookmarking platform that we have been maintaining for a while as a side project.

We never marketed it properly, although it is publicly available and actively maintained.

Current main features are private/public bookmarks, tags, individual lists and shared lists, as well as extensions for Firefox and Chrome.

We will launch soon nested lists and RSS support for lists and user bookmarks.

If you have any question of feedback ping us at hello@urligram.com :)

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