Instapaper announced today it was joining the Borg -- being acquired by Pinterest -- with the typical announcement full of "nothing about our great product will ever change" glee that suddenly-flush buy-outs usually express. Personally, I wouldn't want my profile being absorbed by Pinterest (though that's probably too late), so I will close my account.

I've stopped using Evernote, and returned to doing all my article clipping to DEVONthink on the desktop and in iOS. Feels good not to use anyone's cloud and having someone evaluating my clipping history to do targeted marketing and whatever with my data.

Which leads me to ask: what are you doing for a "clipping" service?

Well, Pocket is the biggest competitor.

If you're willing to get your hands dirty, there's an open source clone called wallabag (https://www.wallabag.org

This is quite unfortunate, Instapaper was one of the only web apps I've actually stuck with, besides Gmail and Pinboard and this acquisition does not bode well. I pretty much know Pinterest as that site that comes up in search results when I'm looking for DIY projects, only to be greeted with "YOU MUST GIVE US YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION TO EVEN *LOOK* AT THIS!!!" upon following the link.

I have a VPS, so I might just give wallabag a try, even if it looks a bit annoying to configure.

That's unfortunate but unsurprising. Instaper was one of the best services. I'm sure they'll be gutted or drained or just plain shut down, it's just a matter of time.

bob, thanks for the wallabag mention, that looks interesting. I too am trying to wean myself from the Borg. gmail and workflowy are the last ones left that I still use regularly. I love workflowy, but the moment I figure out a desktop alternative (not org mode, I tried it) ... I'm gone.

...unless Notion.so or OctopusNote or something else draws me back in... :-)

Good for Instapaper. Let's wait and see how it turns out.

yeah, if only octopusnote was a plugin to devonthink!
And notion.so is pretty nice place to write.

devonthink is getting the hard work from me.

yeah, if only octopusnote was a plugin to devonthink!
And notion.so is pretty nice place to write.

devonthink is getting the hard work from me.

So, being owned by a Pinterest doesn't equate to being a more stable product. Apparently, Instapaper didn't notice it was running out of space for its database hosted on Amazon Web Services -- something a DBA with a couple days experience in the job would have done reflexively -- and the service crashed with a total data loss. The 31 hour outage on February 8 and 9 lead to an extended period of user data being offline, with full restoration delayed to at least February 17.

The good news is, for free you get nothing.

I'd suspect most of use are more adept at backing up and managing our own data than it seems the Pinterest / Instapaper crew is.

Paul Korm wrote:

So, being owned by a Pinterest doesn't equate to being a more stable
product. Apparently, Instapaper didn't notice it was running out of
space for its database hosted on Amazon Web Services -- something a DBA
with a couple days experience in the job would have done reflexively --
and the service crashed with a total data loss. The 31 hour outage on
February 8 and 9 lead to an extended period of user data being offline,
with full restoration delayed to at least February 17.

The good news is, for free you get nothing.

I'd suspect most of use are more adept at backing up and managing our
own data than it seems the Pinterest / Instapaper crew is.

Apparently it's back up. This should serve as a good reminder of the importance of having control of your own data.

...and I need to take my own advice and get my stuff out of there now that it's back.

I was going to add that I need to quit being lazy and set up my own Wallabag instance, but discovered that the group behind it have actually set up a paid service: https://www.wallabag.it/en

It seems until March 1st, it's $10 per year. Very reasonable, if you ask me.

I played with it a bit. It's not as pretty as Instapaper and is missing a few features (sort by reading time is noticeably abscent). BUT, it does have a bunch of export options!

So, I signed up for a free trial of Wallabag.it to put it through its paces with a serious intent to sign up.

The first thing I want to mention is the price. Ten dollars is significantly less than renting a VPS to run your own installation of Wallabag, never mind whatever Instapaper Pro used to cost when it existed.

It has a nice web interface that works as it should, though I do wish there was a "Sort by Reading Time" option. You can filter articles by indicating what length you're looking for, but no one-button option like Instapaper.
There's an annotation function, but it does not provide any easy way to access those annotations, nor does there seem to be any way to export them. That said, while Instapaper does provide a nice interface for looking at your annotations, I don't see any way to export them there, either.
Which bring me to another plus for Wallabag: Exporting! There is so much exporting in Wallabag! EPUB, MOBI, PDF, plain text and more!

But, what about the mobile apps?
This is where we get to a major downside of Wallabag.
The Android app has the bare minimum of functionality you'd expect from a Read Later app. It will sync with Wallabag and store your articles offline. That's about it. There are no filtering options (other than by date, I think). No support for annotations, either making them or reading them from the web app.

I can't really comment on the iOS app, because it's such a pain to get it working that I just didn't bother.

I really want to like Wallabag and the web app does show a lot of promise, but unfortunately, for this class of app, the mobile experience is the most important part.

So, I don't know what to do. Pay for and accept a sub-par experience or roll the dice with Instapaper a little longer?

And then today, there was a major plot twist in the Read It Later app space: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/

I'll take Mozilla over Pintrest any day.