Pocket migration to Firefox accounts (opens in new tab)

Because HN loves complaining about how bad Mozilla is, and that they therefore instead use Chrome...

Because a simple, integrated part of the pocket product just turned into a dependency on a large, complex, fragile ecosystem.

Instead of improving and investing in the pocket product, firefox instead chooses to leverage it to promote their other stuff, at the expense of making pocket's user experience worse.

> I feel like every FF related post reminds me that Mozilla has lost their way. What can be done to bring it back?

cutting off the money supply or a complete cleanout of the executive team

I just disable pocket in about:config. It’s annoying that I have to do that at all, but it does the trick.

Hi all! I'm the head of product at Pocket. We're in active conversations with Kobo right now to find ways to preserve that connection. It's a really important one for us.

Absolutely the first thing I wondered and came here to comment on. Not answered in the FAQ section of the page.

I heard Wallabag is a nice Pocket alternative. And you can host it yourself. I'll try putting it on my odroid one of this day.

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)

Save as ebook extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saveasebook/), everything goes in a folder managed by syncthing so I have it on my smartphone as well.

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.

I recently heard about Alfread on HN. [1] If you're just looking to replace the front end, you can use it to pull from Instapaper/Pocket feeds.

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!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29703671

I've used instapaper for a long time, and it's a better product than Pocket, but it, too, has the problem of missing images sometimes.

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.

I've been pretty happy with https://pinboard.in/

It doesn't have fancy graphical previews and stuff like that, but it works and archives page contents for an extra fee.

Instapaper is you like cross-platform, including Kindle.

GoodLinks if you only use Apple and value privacy.

I used Raindrop.io for a while after moving off Pocket, it’s much better. Now I’m trying out mymind but it’s costly so I may revert back if I don’t find it overly better.

I am also looking for an alternative. Pocket just isn't good at what it's supposed to do: saving articles for later reading, often offline.

I've noticed similar issues lately. In fact, I have resorted to keeping my my Pocket browser extension in Brave disabled because for whatever reason, Pocket seems to cause the browser to fully utilize ~1.5 cores. I only discovered this after disabling all extensions and using them one at a time. Pocket was the only one that seemed to have a consistent signal. I haven't had weird Brave CPU spikes since I disabled Pocket.

I've wondered about how to exfiltrate all of my accumulated links I've put into Pocket over the past ~7 years or so.

I am hopeful that the Readwise Reader product will be good. However, it is still closed beta.

Worldbrain Memex is incredible

When a company with a huge user base (Mozilla) acquires a company with a much smaller user base (Pocket), they're probably not doing it to cross-sell the smaller user base.

I thought Mozilla was going to be investing in Pocket and giving them the resources to grow, as well as sending them Mozilla's users — a fraction of whom would become premium Pocket subscribers.

But as far as I can tell, there haven't been any notable new features in the last 5 years. In fact, some stuff like the web app have gotten noticeably worse. I used to use Pocket almost daily, but now I use it maybe once every couple months.

I recently set up a Firefox Accounts server - basically the minimum parts necessary for a self-contained FFSync, without either calling home to Mozilla or their integrated third-parties (mostly payments and analytics; AWS, GCP, Paypal, Stripe, and a few others). A handful of microservices and a few MySQL databases and I think a Redis or two? I only recommend doing it if you enjoy it for the challenge, the stack it's clearly not engineered with an independent self-hoster in mind (though they do support it and people are helpful). It took several days to get up and running. I will share this soon, I hope...

In the meantime, if this all sounds like too much but you'd still like self-hosted FFsync, you can run the syncserver docker image standalone and piggyback on the rest of Mozilla's hosted FXA stack.

I'm not certain just how big the gap is for Pocket ATM (I know they've continuously been opening up since acquisition).

EDIT: Just to not be that guy, microservices as this isn't clearly documented anywhere:

  * pushbox (mysql)
  * fxa-auth-server (redis, 2xmysql, smtp)
  * browseridverifier
  * syncserver (actually tokenserver+syncstorage, if you're not running the docker image. db of choice)
  * fxa-contentserver
  * fxa-graphql-api
  * fxa-profile-server (mysql)

...and "just glue them together" with JWT tokens (look for the scripts in the repo instead of trying to find enlightenment through the source code, docs and issues... heh) and your reverse proxy or load balancer of choice.

Basically impossible to do without docker and even then, it feels like it would be a full time job to maintain.

I played around with the idea of writing a minimal version that cuts out all the fat but even that seems like a monstrous undertaking.

Works much better for me than Chrome had.

I don't think I've seen anything official after this: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/pocket-source-code/43686/12

Quite a lot has happened on their GH, though. I don't think the web front-end is there, but it seriously looks like they're getting there?

https://github.com/Pocket

It's pretty radical just how transparent Mozilla actually is, I think. Here's the start of the mentioned migration https://github.com/mozilla/fxa/issues/10635

Given that we've seen things like Windows take the "you need to create an online account" route, and only a decade ago that would've seemed absolutely absurd, I think your question raises a good point and the downvotes are unjustified.

The only true answer is "not currently". A "not yet" would be too pessimistic, and "never" is too optimistic. If there's one thing that stands out during the past ~decade of software, it's "things are optional... until they aren't."

It isn't. The firefox account features things like sharing your bookmarks/history/etc between devices easily. You don't need to use it to use firefox.

You had to login to use pocket before, what is different now?