Mozilla just announced that they’re killing Pocket, which you may know by its former and better name Read It Later.
So, question: What is a good replacement for Pocket?
The obvious first answer is the Safari Reading List, but that’s missing Pocket features, which include:
Multi-platform: can run on Macs, Windows,…
Multi-browser: There are Pocket integrations for Chrome, Firefox, Safari,…
The Pocket integrations vary in functionality. The best is the In My Pocket add-on for Firefox, which lets you see a list of the saved items right from the toolbar. The dumbed down native Pocket integration in Firefox only lets you add items or go to the Pocket web site to view; they were trying to drive traffic to their site.
What I really will miss, if we find no alternative, is the ability to add an item on my Mac and view it on Windows or vice versa. And that the In My Pocket add-on makes it absurdly easy to add, remove, or see whether a page is saved, as it is just a toggle widget in the search box.
I never used Pocket’s ability to save content so that it could be read offline.
I’ve been using pinboard, and if you pay the $22/year it will store cached copies of the webpage that you’re saving. It’s fulfilling the same thing that I previously used Pocket for.
About The Site
Pinboard is a fast bookmarking website for privacy-minded people. It helps you keep track of things you find online and manage your tab clutter.
The site is one of the oldest independently-run businesses on the web.
What does it do?
The site adds a small button to your browser that lets you remember things you read, giving you the chance to label them with tags and descriptive text.
Your collection is searchable, meaning that you can pipe a lot of stuff into Pinboard and be able to find it months or years later.
Here are some situations where Pinboard is useful:
Do you keep dozens of tabs open and feel guilty about closing the ones you haven’t had time to read?
Do you half-remember interesting things you saw online six months ago, but struggle to find them in a search engine?
Do you want to be able to search your Twitter links and favorites?
Do you read a lot of papers and PDFs and want to be able to search within them?
Do you participate in fandom and want a way to keep track of and share your favorite fic?
Do you find yourself collecting tons of links for a project or research paper you’re working on, with no satisfying way to keep track of them?
Since I have no interest in the “save the website page” feature, only bookmark management, I decided on Raindrop.io.
I think it actually will be an improvement on Read It Later, oops, sorry, I mean Pocket. It has full-function extensions for all my browsers, 2FA security, mobile apps, desktop apps (not that you need them), and a web app. You can set the browser extension to just add or remove a bookmark, or you can have it be a mini-collection browser like the In My Pocket extension.
The only thing I haven’t figured out is if it has an archive like Pocket does. Sometimes I mark a saved site as read, but then want to get it back later.