What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?

I’m working on an open-source social bookmarking site in Elixir that is API compatible with delicious/pinboard.

It’s named linkhut and it’s currently able to import your bookmarks from pinboard and browser exports. The flagship instance is: https://ln.ht

The source code is hosted here: https://sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut/

The documentation: https://docs.linkhut.org/introduction.html

The two things that are important to me in a bookmarking app (and why I‘ve been working on making one of my own on and off for a while): open source and offering an API for other tools to build upon.

The current API on linkhut aims to be bug for bug compatible with pinboard while being more OAuth-y.

I’m still working on an archiving feature similar to pinboard’s. But it’s probably going to take a while, I’ve been experimenting with different approaches and there’s still a few things I want to explore before settling on a solution. Once that’s ready I think I’ll call 1.0 complete.

In the meantime I’m still working through a laundry list of quality of life and small features (e.g.: recently I pushed support for “unread” links).

It's hard for me to fathom why people continue to pay for a service, whose founder time and time again shown that providing a good service is least of his priority. It took me four emails and two DMs just for him to acknowledge that there was a problem back in 2019. I understand virtue of simplicity, but how much can it hurt to just make the site responsive or just fix the fucking bookmarklet so it doesn't take multiple clicks to add a single bookmark?

Archiving and full-text search are useful features, but they are so unreliable that it doesn't make sense to continue paying. Trust me, copy/pasting links in your notes app is a much saner alternative.

Anybox [1] is a great replacement if you are in the Apple ecosystem.

Raindrop [2] is another alternative that a lot of people seem to enjoy.

I tried many alternatives to Pinboard and like AnyBox best so far.

[1] https://anybox.app/ [2] https://raindrop.io/

I'm miserable about Pinboard. I loved it, I even paid extra to get a silly emoji thinking I could throw some extra money to the developer.

Except when I stopped my subscription I got locked out my grandfathered account and couldn't use it as I could before. Basically punishing me for donating.

Oh well.

We worry about the “bus problem” when it comes to one dev operations but should we also worry about the “dev getting bored” problem?

I’m not sure what’s happened to Pinboard I hope Maciej is alright.

I tweeted him ages ago asking about if the pin a URL page could become responsive so I don’t have to use a separate mobile app. He’s responded with a joke. Years later and I’m still using the mobile app.

POLL: Should I step down as head of Pinboard? I will abide by the results of this poll.

Pinboard is arguably the type of service that can withstand the tide of times much better than overblown posh "modern" web apps. But it's a sad truth that even the best things eventually erode and die. I really hope Maciej is doing well and doing other important things, and I hope that others pick up the crucial task of safeguarding the web in a sane way.

As for the rest of us, I stick to Cavafy:

> As someone long prepared for this to happen

> Go firmly to the window. Drink it in

> Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing

> Your first commitments tangible again

> And you who had the honor of her evening

> And by that honor had your own restored –

> Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving;

> Alexandra leaving with her lord

I don't use pinboard but I have seen enough posts on HN now complaining about lack of response from Pinboard to paying users. I know it is run by 1 person and he clearly doesn't care. Try and move on if you can.

I would encourage people who are a little technical to try creating their own solution to the problem that Pinboard.in tries to address. I did this with a similar ethos (simple design, plain html, no external js libs) and I've been running it for the last 2 years very happily.

In fact, I've said on HN a few times this year how I could never go back to anything else after the lived experience of using such a key tool that is built to do exactly what I want.[1]

[1] Some previous discussions on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627603

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556765

This post pretty much encapsulates the problem with consumer Saas as a business model.

If you’re charging $1-2/month, you need thousands of paying customers to make it a worthwhile endeavor (vs just working for someone else).

With thousands of paid users, support requests are going to come in pretty much daily—-and you’ll be amazed how many people think you should be on-call 24/7 to provide support for them even if they’re only paying you $2!

Then the bad reviews start piling up, the codebase gets stale, competitors starting biting at your heels, your motivation wanes, etc.

The market developed the way it did for a reason. Google of the early 2000s wasn’t stupid. Consumers value their time at zero and don’t want to pay for anything, so they get invasive ads, trackers, and robot support.

Businesses value their time appropriately, so that’s why there’s still a robust paid B2B Saas market.

Self-hosted Wallabag[0] FTW

The cloud is just someone else's computer.

[0] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

That sounds quite tragic. Must be annoying. Not sure if it's the same use case, but if you're interested in archiving links from bookmarks, my DiskerNet product does that: https://github.com/crisdosyago/DiskerNet

also there's plenty of other archiving solutions you can find online, like SingleFile, ArchiveBox, Memento, ... etc

I use https://ln.ht/ that someone wrote in elixir

Maybe it’s impossible to say "I don’t care about this anymore and you should find something else" for a few different reasons: the recurring subs would dry up; he doesn’t want to admit it. OR: he’s been working on pinboard v2 for a couple years and wants to drive people WILD with a sudden drop.

I was an early adopter, though, and I bought in because I perceived the whole point to be "you can have a sustainable, better product than something that gets gobbled up by a megacorp."

I've been a user since 2011. I love the simplicity of the site. A few years ago all the old-timers that paid once in the past have been asked to switch to a subscription plan.

I would have happily done it if it wasn't for the abysmal support. Twice I emailed about an issue and haven't even gotten as much as a confirmation that my mail was received.

With a product as simple as this, I can get behind saying no to feature requests, but there are actual bugs that are ignored.

Is there maybe some sort of self-hostable php solution like this?

Weird, not long ago there was nothing but praise for this service and the author, now both the service and HN's opinion seem to have backslid.

> I notice that idlewords is recently active on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords

We need a way to page HN users...

I still use it, but I stopped paying after archiving stopped working and none of my emails were answered anymore.

At that point it fell back to my original perpetual license it seems.

Edit: for those who wonder what it was all about it was a replacement for the social bookmarking service del.icio.us.

Part of the appeal for people like me who were also enthusiastic early WhatsApp adapters was the idea "I/we charge you money and provide a service, thats it, no ads/tracking funny business."

Can you please share your script for manually downloading all the backups? I also can't manage to get a backup done.

I use, like and pay for Pinboard. I don't use the archiving feature though - it's just a dump for links, and it does that very well.

I do worry that it's going to go kaput from neglect at some point, so it would be nice to see a bit of development and get these issues fixed. But either way the level of outrage here is a bit OTT. It's not life or death, it's just bookmarks.

I'd love an alternative but none of the suggestions integrate directly with IFTTT[1] which I use extensively to stuff things into pinboard. Tens of thousands of things over the years.

(I also requested my archive a couple of weeks back with no result. It's disheartening.)

[1] It's possible that some of them could be integrated via the Webhook functionality but eh.

His Twitter account said he's taking a year off from Twitter. Maybe he's taking a year off from other things too.

"Alright, I'm going to take a year off the twitters and see what else I can do with the time...See you all in 2023!"

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1476079701978345472

Had no idea what pinboard was before this thread. The website looks not so great, but reading the service is quite amazing how it nailed such a simple idea so well. Totally understand being a useful service.

Too bad there’s so many issues reported here. Is there any self hostable open source alternative?

From the outside looking in it seems like being terminally online has damaged him in some way. Very sad, hope he gets some help to get over what’s causing him this derangement.

This is my first time hearing about this website. Surprising to see the founder is American but the top level domain for pinboard is Indian, any particular reason he chose .in ?

Working on an alternative take — follow https://twitter.com/flipso for updates.

Out of curiosity, why has a replacement for this service not been created? I don't use the product myself but love the developers blog.

> Types "Why is internet waiter rude to me? (Dec '22 edition)"

> Gets mad when internet waiter is rude in comments

This guy's shtick has always been "I am a shithead", it's funny to see people disappointed that they found out he's a shithead.

If you want to be holy to HN, you have to develop a product with zero modernity, zero responsiveness. It's really interesting to pay for a site that only one man developed for his own pleasure.

Why would you capitalize most words in the title? It's harder to read, especially with invented names which should always be capitalized.