- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
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Sad news, but trimming the fat is what people wanted Mozilla to do. Anyone know a good alternative to Fakespot? I absolutely don’t trust amazon’s own review summaries, and expect other alternatives would be for-profit data harvesters.
From the 404media article on the subject:
The Distilled announcement post says the company made the choice to shut down these products because “it’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.” It also says the choice will allow Mozilla to “shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.” Which is what everyone wants: more AI bloat in their browsers.
(The monkey paw turns, and) we got our wish.
We did, internet! We killed Pocket!
As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.
Yup, just got a Kobo and absolutely love the Pocket integration… I hope some alternative is implemented…
Owning things like Pocket is fine as long as each product stands on it’s own. Melding them together is what upsets their user base.
100%. And companies don’t seem to realize this. I’ll use fakespot, but there is absolutely no use for it to be an inbrowser app, and the fact that it suggests (pushes) the idea each time I use the website is just maddening. That said, I appreciate that service.
Pocket can stay or leave. I don’t care one way or the other. I never understood its usecase.
the fact that it suggests (pushes) the idea each time I use the website is just maddening
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this suggestion. IDK where I clicked “STFU” but I only ever remember seeing something about it once.
I clear cookies often, so it could be a cookie setting, maybe.
I never understood its usecase.
I used to use it when I was browsing the web at work. If I was reading something at the end of the day, or if it was something I didn’t want to read at work, I’d give it a pocket bookmark. Then I could pull out my phone and finish right where I left off during my train commute.
Huh. Ok, cool. I just go to the address bar and enter QR to it, which triggers some search engines to generate a qr code for the following text. I, then, scan that code to my phone, and open the page on it to read later.
Pocket is the sort of shit that makes me embarrassed to recommend Firefox.
Nobody cared to use Pocket so its not surprising, btw what was that Fakespot thing?
I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product’s reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an “adjusted” aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.
I’m going to miss fakespot. I don’t know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.
It tried to show how authentic a product review was
cant say if it was accurate or not
YES! No more Pocket button sticking out like a sore thumb!
It literally takes 5 seconds to remove it.
No time, need to shit post
But you can’t remove pocket from firefox just disable it. Given that it wa also a close source binary blob that made firefox not completely open source I’m glad it’s going.
Wasn’t it possible to remove that button?
Possible: yes
Convenient: no
It’s literally in the same place as all other UI customising, though. I consider that as convenient as it gets.
“Oh no, I have to move the mouse for about 10 cm!”
with every fucking install on every machine. for years.
a waste of space and time. always has been. but did moz listen? no. because fanboys like you mock the user and give them the confidence to do stupid shit. lame CEOs, failed TB, fxa servers…geez the list of absolute wrong directions moz went is so long.
praising freedom and a decentralized internet, but store links, passwords etc on their shit american servers. the only good idea moz has was to start coding a browser…after that it just went downhill…according to the decline of users of the years. what is their market share today and why?
with every fucking install on every machine. for years.
Multiplied by all the other annoyances you have to turn off, via either gui or
about:config, each and every time. I feel you.I hop machines fairly frequently, use multiple browsing profiles, and often create discardable profiles, so I eventually just went ahead and spent some time tracing all the
about:configequivalents of the settings that I typically change every time and then put them in auser.jsfile that I can just drop into my profile directory.…which is pretty smart. but many of my installs unfortunately include osx and even still windows. not for me, but but for work and ppl that want alternatives. and i just dont have the time for these shenanigans every time. and as much as i hate it to say: a chrome install feels cleaner. so for myself i rsync my ffprofile folder to a remote storage. but i will consider your method now. thanks.
Wasn’t it in about:config? Or maybe it used to be.
Yes, to completely turn it off, it’s an
about:configsetting:extensions.pocket.enabledRemoving it from the toolbar just hides it, but keeps it running.
Could have been back when the button was part of the address bar. But that was forever ago.
That’s what I’m thinking of them. Good on them for removing it in the meantime.
?
You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.
Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.
You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.
On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket
On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket
And then people get all pissy when Google or Microsoft show a pop-up of a new feature…
In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features. If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in. Anything beyond that is inherently predatory.
Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification, so you can easily disable it the first time they become relevant. If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.
In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features
This is exactly how it works in things like Office or Edge.
If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in
Yup. Or unless a new feature is introduced, in which case a new pop-up appears. That’s precisely how it works.
Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification
Edge, most of the time, just opens a new tab with “Your Edge was updated” and a list of new things.
If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.
If it was about the same feature that you already dismissed - yeah, I get the sentiment. If it’s about completely new things - it’s a really weird thing to say. How are users supposed to know that something new was introduced? Sift through thousands of lines of changelogs…?
If the user has indicated that they are not interested in new features, it means they do not care about new features. They don’t want to know about them, or they prefer to find out proactively in their own time. If you still insist on ramming notifications down their throat at that point, you’re not doing it for the user. You’re doing it for yourself.
Right. And then we see comments like the one that started this thread: “whoa, there was a Pocket integration??”
Yes, Microsoft is especially bad in this regard. For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending. They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen. And youtube premium, oh boy.
For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending
This is… not quite related to the topic, no? Trial ending warning is not a “hey, here’s a new feature you might want to try out”.
They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen
Could you elaborate? I used to use Edge as my daily driver, now it’s my secondary browser. I have no clue what you mean here.
Not speaking of edge here, but the Microsoft fabric/power platform. They tried to sell me some feature for months and eventually i missclicked and started the trial. Now they are notifying that the trial ends in x days and they’ve been extending it so it never ends
Switched to LibreWolf after seeing the message about Fakespot. It was a heavily used browser add-on I used almost religiously since 2020. Mozilla acquired them in 2023 and then did nothing with it, letting it die. I’m so tired of this bullshit.
Is it free software?
Then anyone can make the improvements they want for it.
Good. I never trusted those integrated apps and thought of them as spyware. Mozilla should go back to focusing on making a lean browser and whatever apps they want to offer should be optional instead of hard coded into their flagship product.
To be fair, I think they both existed as separate products first, before Mozilla bought them. I used both, but they should have never been integrated as a part of a browser…
The moment I setup an Omnivore account, it gets acquired and dies, the moment I switch to Pocket it’s dead lol, I think I’ll just move to some open source self hosted read it later app like Karakeep
No! Use your power for good! Switch to Facebook and X!
I know what I need to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it!
Pocket was silly, just use tabs and buy more RAM.
well shit, i loved pocket. i guess time to make my own del.icio.us social bookmarking/saving app like i’ve been wanting to for years.
I’ve been using raindrop.io for years now and highly recommend checking it out
Yeah I’ve been using pocket since it was Read It Later. I got shit in there going back about 15 years I guess I’ll be exporting and finally going through lmao.
deleted by creator
yeah fair lmao
As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?
Never used pocket, how does this differ from just having a bookmarks folder called “stuff to read while you’re taking a shit”?
The difference is in convenience.
On the one hand, you can add a page to your bookmarks, after choosing the correct folder, of course.
On the other hand, you can click a button and a page gets automatically saved in your “read later” storage, with a description, summary, and a preview of the content.
Pocket saved an offline searchable archive of all of the article text. Multiple times I found articles I saved that were no longer online. So no, it’s not the same as bookmarks
I don’t save stuff with it but I read the articles that come up on desktop. so it’s kinda like a community, subreddit, rss feed, whatever
Bookmarks can do all that already or am I missing something?
Pocket can save the content of an article without the formatting and ads, which you can then download to Pocket’s app for offline reading.
Ah thanks TIL
Before pocket I was using instapaper, seems like it’s still around. Bit of a shame about pocket, it’s pretty useful
Synced bookmarks. You’ll be happy to learn that this is also a feature Firefox offers.
I don’t want to sync my bookmarks. The sites I want bookmarked on my desktop are not the same as the sites I want bookmarked on my phone nor the sites I want bookmarked on my work laptop.
They go to different locations. The ones from mobile are in “mobile bookmarks”.
I use Inoreader as my RSS feed reader and it has a section to save webpages in a similar fashion.
Really disappointed to lose Pocket. I am a big user of it and found it very convenient to save articles of interest as well as collecting anything that looked interesting that I might want to read. Have both the Android app and use it on the desktop.
Now I’m going to have to find a substitute.
I liked the concept but immediately thought “this is gonna get dropped eventually and I’ll lose all the shit I saved”. Looks like I was right.
Let us know if you find a replacement. I have pocket on my e-reader and I’m going to miss it
Perhaps Wallabag, a self-hostable service to save and categorize articles?
Also @[email protected] and @[email protected]
Karakeep is another open source read it later app that is popular
Based on https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/2206365/Alternatives-to-MZLA-Pocket I’m going to try Wallabag and/or Readeck. Probably the critical issue is whether you can self-host or not:
- Wallabag has a paid public instance, but Readeck you’d have to host yourself until their public service launches later this year (see https://readeck.org/en/start)
- Wallabag uses the Pocket API to transfer data (so I think you’d need to migrate before Pocket shuts down), whilst Readeck can import the file produced by a Pocket export.
- Wallabag has phone apps, whilst Readeck is browser-only (does your e-reader support a browser?)
- Readeck can export to ebook formats (so might be more useful for e-readers in this regard); not sure about Wallabag
I enjoy pocket for the articles that come up on the new tab page. I’ve never once saved an article for later with it.
