Monday, May 26, 2025

This is the forty-seventh installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

I recently learned that Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, one of the many read-it-later services that have been out there over the years. You basically use them to mark articles or websites that you want to look at later on, and then forget to actually read them and feel disappointed that your list keeps getting longer and you don’t seem to actually be reading anything at all. Or at least that’s how it went for me. I remember using Pocket itself a long time ago, though now I use the saved articles feature of Inoreader, or just put it in a seemingly endless list of open tabs. I do get back to some articles eventually, and if I haven’t gotten to it in a month or so, I just close it. It wasn’t that important anyway.

This is the reason why the service is getting shut down in the first place, because “the way people use the web has evolved” and there’s really no need to have an entire web service just to store lists of URLs that people ignore. There’s been a way to do that since browsers were invented, which is called bookmarks. When was the last time you bookmarked a site? I use the bookmarks bar in Vivaldi for a quick list of sites that I access frequently but don’t want to keep tabs open for, and to keep track of things like all of the sites where my books are listed and available (though that list has shrunk recently).

Sometimes I’ll save a site in Zoho Notebook, but I could also use my Zoho Mail bookmarks feature instead. Or the Reading List feature in Vivaldi (how is that different than a bookmark? I’m not sure). The point is that there are lots of ways to store lists of sites and articles, many of which come with services that you already use, and which sync between devices if that’s a thing you need, so having a service dedicated to just a single purpose doesn’t make much sense anymore.

The other main point of this article is that when you rely on an external service, there’s no way of guaranteeing that it will stick around. Pocket itself has been around for an impressive 18 years, but with the constantly changing tech world, especially companies buying one another to acquire their powers, you can never tell if something you use will be there in the long term.

I rely a lot on Zoho, but they’re a pretty stable company that probably won’t be shutting down any of their major services anytime soon. Even if they do, I can export all of my data to use somewhere else. Writing and note-taking apps like Scrivener are great because they don’t rely on online services, so there’s nothing to export if the company does go away. And the bookmarks list in your browser will be there for as long as you have your browser. If you decide to use a different one, you can always export. Keep an eye on where your data goes and who’s controlling it; you’ll be better off if you do.