Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.

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• buffaloseven@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they’re all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.

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  • slampisko@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you use KoReader, you can use Wallabag for the same purpose.

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    • buffaloseven@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ll have to see if I want to go to the rigamarole of setting up Wallabag on my home server or if I just fall back to using GoodLinks on iOS exclusively and forgo articles on my e-reader.

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• ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I try to support Mozilla (and more obscure open source projects we take for granted) through donations and subscriptions. But I never used Pocket or Fakespot.

  I don’t think it should be a forced payment but I’d pay a few bucks a month for a true developer edition. The current one is essentially just the early beta for extension developers but something really developer focused with no bullshit and developer tools at the forefront. I don’t know if that’s something other people would pay for but I feel like it’s easier to shell out cash when I’m using it for work. A lot of people could probably expense it.

  It likely wouldn’t replace the Google money but it’d be a start.

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• CannedYeet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Noo! I loved Pocket. It’s integrated into my Kobo eReader. It was the only good way to get articles easily synced on to an eReader. I hope Kobo buys Pocket. Or Rakuten, since that’s a tech company and they own Kobo.

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  • Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Similarly, I used p2k.co (Pocket to Kindle). My use case was to clip things with Pocket, which would then automatically send them to my Kindle, where I prefer reading longer articles and books. Retroactively, kind of my fault for being an earlier adopter of a locked-down device like the Kindle from a massive corporation and never moving on from it…

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  • EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    wallabag.org

    Supposedly Wallabag works Kobo readers. Most people self host Wallabag but I think they do have a hosted option as well.

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  • Tim_Bisley@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I used it extensively on my Kobo as well. So nice to be browsing on my phone and see long articles to read and just save them to enjoy on a nice eink screen later when I have time.

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• toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  part of me thinks “great, those things were annoying”

  another part of me thinks it’s a harbinger

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  • the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wouldn’t disagree that firefox is about to get enshittififed but I hope its not true.

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• deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Pocket is basically a chumbox, but it’s a pretty good chumbox.

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• Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  pocket I never used. I found it ugly and just s violation of privacy as it moved a service that should be local only, to external webservers. I can see why it’s finally had the plug pulled

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  • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.

    Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.

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    • lime@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      the main thing with pocket and services like it is that it saves and syncs entire pages. like a local internet archive.

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    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.

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• reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Idiots.

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• cascadia99@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I liked Fakespot. Amazon obviously doesn’t care whether reviews are legit.

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  • dinckelman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’ve never known about it until just now, but I wish I had, because my mom definitely needs something like that. Quite a shame

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  • Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I think it’s a good tool. I also think people and companies learned how to circumvent it and avoid being too obvious. And that was before AI! Plus, Firefox (who I didn’t even know owned it before today!) doesn’t want to enough time/money into it in a perpetual arms race…

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  • lemmyingly@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Fakespot has always felt inaccurate to me. Once every 6 months or so I gave it a go to see if any of the updates have improved it but it never felt like it did to me.

    Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.

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    • Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Your 2nd point doesn’t make any sense. Sure, you can spend the time returning things. If they’re bad and you know they’re bad. But what if they’re just bad enough?

      Take guitar pedals, for example. I know nothing about guitar pedals. I don’t know the brands, I don’t know the features I should look for, what they should cost, nothing. A company can purchase thousands, tens of thousands, or more fake reviews from a bot farm run by wage slaves. I might buy their subpar pedal based on the good review score. It’s fine, it works well enough from my initial testing and doesn’t die…

      But what I wanted was to purchase one of the better ones, which the false reviews told me it was! I could have spent the same or less for a better product, that rewarded the company that made the superior product. And I might not even know it, at least until it’s too late to return. That’s (one of) the problems with how bad fake reviews have gotten.

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    • spector@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I stopped trusting it much when I noticed there’s a huge difference between the same product on amazon.ca and amazon.com. On one domain it can give something an F grade while on the other domain it will have an A grade.

      It’s a nice idea but when you think it about it’s actually kind of hard to determine the quality of a particular listing apart from the obvious checks you can do yourself. Like if the seller is some random drop shipper or actually Amazon or the manufacturer.

      Judging reviews with whatever AI system they use is not very accurate anyways.

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    • cascadia99@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve also wondered about Fakespot’s accuracy. I just viewed it as one tool when doing online shopping. I’d prefer not to order crap in the first place than try to return something later.

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    • CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.

      Why go through that hassle if you can avoid it in the first place?

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• desmosthenes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  shame about pocket - wonder how much of a hole that really burned in their pocket - if much

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• IsaamoonKHGDT_6143@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Why doesn’t Mozilla change or add the MIT license to Pocket?

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  • lime@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    because it’s all Apache 2.0 or MPL

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  • CannedYeet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s a service. It doesn’t just run in the browser.

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    • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You mean, perfect for self-hosting? 😀

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    • GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It SHOULD!

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• xiao@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  wallabag.org

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  • ratel@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Thanks - added to Pocket to read it later.

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  • sporks_a_plenty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Thx for this.

    Also, shout-out to karakeep.app (formerly “Hoarder”)

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    • GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thank you! Guess I’ll be trying something new.

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• FireWire400@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn’t the only one doing that… Never even heard of Fakespot, though.

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  • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I used to use Pocket a lot, it was my main way to read long form articles. I somehow stopped doing that years ago as a way to preserve my mental health. Since then I haven’t used Pocket once.

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  • tamal3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Didn’t some articles have the pocket icon, and some were without? I remember trying it a number of years ago and being completely flummoxed by not being able to save things I wanted to read. Though it could have been user error.

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  • M137@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Bookmarks and services like pocket are for different things. Bookmarks are for websites you come back to often. Pocket and other services like it are for saving link to stuff you want to remember and/or come back to once or a few times. Bookmarks are not made for having thousands of, while “read later” services are for saving anything and easily have hundreds, thousands tens or hundreds of thousands of things saved.

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    • bufalo1973@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “Read once bookmark”. Problem solved.

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  • killerscene@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    i used to use pocket all the time back in the day. slowly realized there arent many articles worth saving for later let alone reading at all.

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  • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.

    Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.

    I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects.

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    • acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      well they are terminating it for a reason.

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  • Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, me too. I hate that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar. It’s the first thing I disable on every Firefox installation.

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  • GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    OMG I JUST started using Pocket because my work banned Firefox and made us all switch to Edge!!

    Now how am I going to sync bookmarks and pages I want to read later on my personal devices??

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    • Cossty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I forgot what it is called but there is an extension that syncs bookmarks between Firefox and Chromium browsers.

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    • ToffeeIsForClosers@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.

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    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’d be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn’t require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..

      Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.

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    • drspod@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If your work doesn’t care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.

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    • catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I generate a QR code and scan it with my phone. Don’t sync work and personal devices.

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  • JTskulk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Fakespot was kinda nice, whenever I looked at something on amazon I’d get a sidebar showing which reviews are real and summarizing them. It’s actually pretty useful. Definitely will not miss Pocket.

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    • bufalo1973@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve found a better way to use Amazon: not using it and fuck you, Bezos.

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    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.

      The best method I’ve had is to ignore any off brand looking product that’s been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.

      Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it’s for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.

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    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      didn’t fakespot only work in the USA?

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    • danc4498@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Is camel camel camel still useful for Amazon?

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  • orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I use Fakespot but wasn’t aware it was a Mozilla product.

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    • Tim_Bisley@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The bought it out. It was originally an extension.

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• jeena@piefed.jeena.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Good.

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