[HN Gopher] I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription
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I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription
Author : leotravis10
Score : 119 points
Date : 2024-09-13 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.kateva.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.kateva.org)
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| I was early to sign up for pinboard, got the lifetime
| subscription at $11
|
| I received an email from them asking me to move to a yearly
| subscription, although I could choose to decline
|
| I chose to decline, mostly glad about the decision, I paid what
| was asked when I originally signed up
| slyall wrote:
| Same here. Any time I get annoyed with the site problems I just
| remind myself I paid once years ago and the site works 99% of
| the time.
|
| I think if I was paying $20/year I would be really annoyed and
| have moved elsewhere years ago.
| viburnum wrote:
| I used pinboard for years until I started saving web pages as
| PDFs in my Dropbox folder. I got the idea from pinboard's own
| archive feature.
| ghoomketu wrote:
| Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the
| idea of "Don't be a free user" (1) is now shutting down (edit:
| sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it's in a
| free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn (2)). Their
| article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump
| schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better
| support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service
| that couldn't sustain itself.
|
| It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to
| market forces and operational challenges.
|
| Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof,
| and unless you can self host something you can never know when
| and how it will end.
|
| (1) https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
|
| (2) https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+pinboard
| slater wrote:
| > Wow, the irony is Pinboard [...] is now shutting down.
|
| Where are you seeing that?
| omega3 wrote:
| Pinboard isn't shutting down.
| b5 wrote:
| Is Pinboard actually closing? There's nothing to indicate that
| on the site's blog or its Twitter[2] (which had a post four
| days ago).
|
| [1]: https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ [2]: https://x.com/Pinboard
| personjerry wrote:
| Every paid service shuts down eventually.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Who said it's shutting down?
|
| It could also be that maciej has enough paying users that he
| can afford to coast and be unresponsive, losing some users in
| the process, in order to do whatever else he's doing these
| days.
|
| The about page says 30,000 active users; most must be paying
| since there is no free service it seems (though there used to
| be way back in the day; I used it myself). If half of those are
| paying, that's $330K a year. Not bad.
| jamespo wrote:
| Perhaps decaying is the right term
| supahfly_remix wrote:
| FWIW, Pinboard's founder is still actively commenting
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords) on HN as of 7
| days ago.
| creaktive wrote:
| Ah, thanks! Gonna ping him to allow me to download my pin
| archive :)
| Rekksu wrote:
| He's also somewhat active on twitter: https://x.com/pinboard
| creaktive wrote:
| I'm frankly impressed by how many people still use Pinboard!
| Like, when I pin some recent niche news article, Pinboard shows
| that other tens of people already did the same...
| mcgrath_sh wrote:
| I have requested my full archive download a couple of times over
| the last year and haven't been able to get it, which stinks. I
| keep trying to figure out a migration plan, but it seems
| daunting, especially with so many archived bookmarks. I love the
| service and want to keep using it, but the inability to get a
| backup archive makes me nervous.
| creaktive wrote:
| Yep, stopped working for me years ago. Had to contact The Guy
| personally every single time, because my archive grew to 20GB.
| He's not responsive for years tho :(
| ww2supercut wrote:
| How are others storing their bookmarks now? I've moved to
| Google Sheets for some cases, but it's much less powerful
| atombender wrote:
| Raindrop is fantastic: https://raindrop.io/.
| bananapub wrote:
| $28/year, also "AI Suggestions" is the first item on the
| "Pro" features list.
|
| I'm sure it's a fine CRUD app but I don't really hold hope
| for it being a long term success.
| elashri wrote:
| This app added this AI feature recently. It is very
| successful for years before current LLM hype.
| atombender wrote:
| Raindrop is not a new app. I've been using it for about
| five years now.
|
| It's a solo developer project by one guy in Kazakhstan,
| which makes it all the more impressive. It has a great
| browser extension, a great desktop app (Electron-based,
| but very well done), and a great iOS mobile app (no idea
| about Android). It's also been under active development
| since I started using it.
|
| One of its best features is its app, which allows you to
| browse your bookmarks in a split pane.
|
| I've only checked out the AI feature now, since you
| mentioned it. I'm not a fan of pointless AI features that
| get added to apps, but this one is actually useful! It
| suggests places your bookmarks should be moved to. I had
| a bunch of stuff in an "Unsorted" folder, and it actually
| made really accurate suggestions for where they should be
| moved, and it also suggested moving some stuff I had
| miscategorized or where I had a more specific folder it
| could be in.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Honestly that's a rare good use case for AI: low stakes,
| passes through a human before anything actually happens,
| and is about ambiguos categorization based on human
| language.
| atombender wrote:
| Agreed!
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I can vouch for that. I have been using it for many years.
| djbusby wrote:
| Homebuilt tool. Started when the Pocket BS in FF happened,
| just kept playing with it. It's a PWA/Share Target on mobile
| and an extension in my browser.
|
| Downside is I have to be online to use it.
| woodglyst wrote:
| I got Anybox[0] with the lifetime subscription (40$) and have
| been happy with it (Only for Apple devices unfortunately)
|
| I can choose to automatically download a web archive when I
| bookmark. Also has a trial version. Can be a bit overwhelming
| to set things up. But works seamlessly once done.
|
| [0] https://anybox.app/
| avhon1 wrote:
| Zotero with the browser plugin
| cxr wrote:
| Firefox native bookmarks
| stock_toaster wrote:
| I self host with linkding[1].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
| chb wrote:
| It was a surprise to me to discover that Maciej is actually the
| author behind the idlewords blog. He published this in May of
| this year: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Check out Shaarli if you are open to self hosted options.
|
| Like pinboard it feels old but in a good way (aka it is light on
| resources and has a limited featureset). However, I will say that
| I do not care to archive pages and just use the wayback machine
| for dead links instead.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| It was murky but I did appreciate that they took over del.icio.us
| and sort of half made it available again. Regardless, a legend in
| the game.
| jakub_g wrote:
| For people who didn't read the linked article: Pinboard is not
| shutting down, just the OP is tired with outages and
| unresponsiveness of the owner.
| dang wrote:
| Yeah I was confused by that too, so have replaced the title
| with more representative language from the article body.
| mkerrigan wrote:
| It really depends on your needs. I use Pinboard on many different
| browsers and devices and I'm not really interested in running my
| own service. I'll happily pay for the full text archiving but I
| acknowledge it is not perfect. I have come to the conclusion if
| you want to retain full text copies of your bookmarks, you need
| to download the pages yourself. I have been using SingleFile
| extension but there is also a CLI available.
| mcgrath_sh wrote:
| What have you been using for search? The CLI app? What is your
| download workflow like? Is there an automated way to download a
| bunch of links, say pulled in from an API?
| tinotopia wrote:
| I asked him for my full archive download in October 2022, and
| having heard nothing back I wound up paying him another $39 to
| keep my archive from being deleted while I tried to get his
| attention.
|
| I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent
| me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and
| about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether
| I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for
| "in late January".
|
| I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in _February_ hadn 't
| worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours
| everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.
|
| Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months
| earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the
| man.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Same thing happened to me around that same time.
|
| I've been pretty happy with raindrop.io ever since.
| horse666 wrote:
| Obligatory mention of https://raindrop.io/
|
| I switched from Pinboard a year or more ago after using it for
| many years, mainly because I found the iPhone app and integration
| (eg share feature, to save bookmarks) to be flaky.
|
| Raindrop has been great - imported seamlessly from Pinboard and
| the iPhone and Desktop app work well for me.
| masylum wrote:
| there are plenty of good alternatives nowadays:
|
| - https://raindrop.io/: Also a one-man show, but probably the
| best bookmarking tool out there.
|
| - https://omnivore.app: Open source and support for newsletters.
|
| For my use case though (I like to curate and share), I ended up
| building an app (https://fika.bar) to bundle bookmarking + RSS
| Reader + Blogging.
| severine wrote:
| Yours look great, you should have a demo though.
| Axsuul wrote:
| I was a previous Pinboard customer. I've since moved to
| Linkding[0], a self-hosted solution, and highly recommend it.
| It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard but gives me much
| more confidence about the longevity of my bookmarks.
|
| 0. https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
| l0b0 wrote:
| Hopefully coming soon to your favourite distro:
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/341665 :)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard
|
| Internally, perhaps, but it doesn't have external feature
| parity when it comes to, e.g., being able to automagically
| import things using IFTTT.
|
| (Yes, I could probably lash up a webhook feeding into linkding
| but IFTTT's webhook support still isn't great but I'm already
| 20 projects behind on my personal list and redoing all my IFTTT
| recipes that talk to Pinboard isn't going to be a priority.)
|
| Linkding is definitely worth a look though as backup.
| vr46 wrote:
| I barely use it but when I do need to look something up it's
| great. But conscious that it's not super robust, I simply save
| bookmarks in Zotero now and that works even better on all counts.
| l0b0 wrote:
| Did Pinboard get bombed by HN?
|
| > Error: Connection refused
| aEJ04Izw5HYm wrote:
| I still use pinboard every week. I also find it very interesting
| to follow what other people are pinning. There aren't many niche
| places to follow ONLY the notable links of other hackers.
| elashri wrote:
| If anyone is interested into self-hosting their bookmarks service
| so that they don't suffer this again. Here is a list of
| interesting open source projects that provides that
|
| - Linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
|
| - Linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden
|
| - Servas https://github.com/beromir/Servas
|
| - Grimoire https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire
|
| - Hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder
|
| - LinkAce https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/
|
| - Readeck https://readeck.org/en/
|
| - Shaarli https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli
|
| - Shirori https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori
| seltzered_ wrote:
| I'm going to guess pinboard isn't dead, it's just been on the
| backburner. Idlewords (i.e. maciej) still comments on here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords
|
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33557751 (2022)
| joemi wrote:
| I still use it all the time and have been quite happy with it. I
| don't do the full-text archiving, though -- never been of
| interest to me.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The most I know about this company is the entertaining way in
| which he demonstrated that Hacker News polls for "who should we
| fund?" are going to have the same incentives as ones on Reddit.
| Good times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270
|
| I thought it was really funny. You can't really ask a crowd where
| to put your money. They'll operate on their own incentives, not
| yours. And then get pissed off when you don't play along. The
| classic principal-agent problem but the agents are a mob.
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