I’ve been looking at alternatives to Pocket for some time. I like Pocket the service, but there’s a cluster of problems that I’m trying to solve and Pocket only covers a handful of them.
Generally I want to save things I find the internet, which feels a little like grasping at water. I’m trying to bookmark web pages, but I also want to archive them as insurance against link rot. And I want to read long articles independent of their web design. Ideally I want all this without saving my things into a web service and whatever format it uses for itself.
Pocket was always only a partial solution. It was easy to use and gave me bookmarking and clean reading. I needed another piece of software to cover the other cases.
I tried using ArchiveBox. I love the idea of it, but it was overkill for my needs. It downloaded too many weird formats, which would be great if I wanted to capital-A archive a web page, but my needs are more modest. Also ArchiveBox crashed the bejeezus out of my Raspberry Pi server for some reason. I didn’t investigate it that deeply and I gave up on it.
Sometime later I rolled my own command line script that downloads webpages and converts them to text, PDF, and eBook (both epub and mobi for Kindle). It works well but it’s a bit clunky. And it isn’t available on a mobile device, while Pocket is available from my mobile browser’s share sheet.
I considered polishing up my download script, but it was a someday/maybe project at best. Since Pocket is going away forever, and I’ll be relying on that script more, I’ll end up making those updates I wasn’t planning on ever doing.
And now we’ve come to the real reason why I don’t want Pocket to go away. I don’t want to do anything, but now I’ll feel compelled to.
Previously: