I became disillusioned with Pocket after they discontinued social sharing of saved articles. Now I'm just after migrating to Wallabag for my article reading. It's actually remarkably great.
It has full-text search out of the box, and pretty much all the same features as Pocket premium, but doesn't trap you in Yet Another Subscription. It does imports from major bookmarking players and browser bookmarks, and also has a decent API.
1/2
Wallabag has Android and iOS apps, and Chrome and Firefox addons.
I think it should be more popular. But their documentation, especially for first time self-hosted install, sucks ass. I can't be any kinder than this. It was *painful* to get it running and I do this stuff for a living.
The Pocket import is lossy, and also crapped out on account my size (18k items) so I wrote my own. I don't think a "regular" user would have made it.
Devs: write better docs goddamn it.
2/2
@jjcelery Me, a dev: it's self documenting. Even the docs.
@jjcelery painful install aside, it's a fabulous piece piece FOSSiness and kudos to the developers
@spookius it really is wonderful, you know, like that one friend you introduce to uninitiated: "listen he's fine once you get to know him"
@drfyzziks @spookius If you prefer to learn from my experience rather than venture forth yourself I have it half-written-up and can save you some (if not all) of the frustration
@drfyzziks @spookius I'll be writing it up soonish on https://obrien.engineer/ - we do RSS or you can subscribe to get it by email
@jjcelery The docs are definitely a weak point.
On top of that my primary issue with the first run experience was needing to run commands inside the container to get it to actually perform setup - vs. taking what it needed from environment variables and reviewing state on disk or throwing up a first run web interface.
Maintainer time is obviously limited - like that of everyone else, but it _is_ pretty jarring vs. other self-hosted solutions.
@AngryAnt oh don't get me started on their containerised version! I tried that 6mo ago and literally gave up. The container and the related docker compose is only any good for very basic testing. Doesn't do imports, can't run in a pod, breaks the DB on migration jobs. I would not consider that at all production ready.
Had to go with a dedicated install instead.
Which was somehow worse.
Which is a shame, a good docker image would really help the project.
@AngryAnt I'm definitely gonna help out with their docs first, but then I'm gonna go after their docker and docker compose stuff.
The software is so, so good! The packaging is made of wasps.
@jjcelery Thank you for putting in the time!
I wielded my tech super power of overwhelming stubbornness and powered through the container setup. I'm really happy with the solution once it is running - having initially migrated from Instapaper (after having abandoned it for years).
Maybe I'll find the time to set up nix service wrapping for it at some point.
@jjcelery Oh, looks like someone already did that, but it is struggling with upstream build instructions being a moving target (I'm guessing this is part of your "somehow it was even worse" experience).
@AngryAnt I also have wielded my superpower of stubbornness for this I think it's a very weird way of using makefiles that confuses the world out of people.
Ironically by trying to make the install process easier, it makes it more opaque and therefore more difficult instead.
@jjcelery if some day you try frigoligo I’d be interested to know how it handles a 18k items account.
I work with a 4K items (300 unread) account for the development but this is another level.
@frigoligo oh it's cool! I will check it out.
I'm not sure if "another level" is good or bad but it does represent years and years of shameless hoarding
@jjcelery Some say it’s not hoarding if it’s put in a read-it-later app
@jjcelery can you share your pocket importer? The official one (on wallabag.it) just keeps getting timeouts on the pocket API for me.
@jni I'm gonna open-source it but it needs a little extra work on catching pocket's weird timeouts. Pocket can throw a 504 which is easy enough to handle, but sometimes it throws a 200 and _still_ returns an error so I need to do some extra catching for this.
If you want to subscribe, by RSS or email, to https://obrien.engineer/ I'll post it there when it's out.
I also used Pocket as a dumping ground for websites I find that I'll want to look at later (and usually never do, lol).
I'm now using Linkwarden for that aspect of it and Wallabag for the article side of things... especially since the demise of Omnivore!