Sometimes Self-Hosted Open-Source Solutions Are Just Too Much Work

The two major read-it-later services have both been acquired: Pocket by Mozilla (Firefox) and Instapaper by Pinterest. I tend to favor web services in which I control my own data, but right now I feel I’m stuck. I used to self-host Wallabag but I have been unable to install version 2 on my LAMP server. Maybe I’m just not as Linux-fluent as I used to be, but I just have not been able to figure out how to install all the dependencies required to make this app work. (Or I’m not willing to spend hours of research and trial & error just to install an app).

So for now I’m sticking with Pocket. It’s user-friendly and has iOS and Chrome extensions, so it’s really easy to add an article to my reading list. (And if you’re a Workflow user and upset that Apple removed Pocket support, you can add these workflows using the Pocket API).

I’m not thrilled about using Pocket, because (a) they are tracking everything I save to their service; (b) who the f knows what Mozilla is going to do with it? Privacy concerns and impermanence, two constants of the web.