In 3 days Pocket is shutting down, so it's high time to worry about a replacement, if you haven't already. I know a lot of folks took this as a cause to try more sophisticated knowledge management apps (hey @obsidian@mas.to ).

Personally, I was looking to keep the experience of the simple reading stack. And boy, @readeck@mastodon.online is exactly what I was looking for, and better than I was hoping for:

• Open source, written in Go, simple frontend stack.
• Self-hosted, tiny resource footprint, very snappy.
• Does exactly what Pocket used to do, without any of the "discover random shit" nonsense.
• Browser extension and neat workarounds for mobile OSes that make saving pages for later quick and easy. This was where a lot of alternatives fell through for me, saving links was just too fiddly.
• Works equally well on desktop and mobile, supports PWA.
• Pretty well functioning readable mode! And if I find something that doesn't work I could actually go and patch it, if I care enough. Pocket tends to swallow or mangle code blocks more often than not, which was a big pain.

Last but not least, it can import your data from Pocket, so migration is pretty smooth. It did take a few hours to chew through ~2500 articles I've apparently saved over the years, since it had to fetch the links and re-extract the content. This is actually one gripe I have with the Pocket export: it just gives you a CVS with links and light metadata, but it doesn't export the saved article content. If you have a 10 year old link in there somewhere, ~pray~ donate to web archive gods that it has been saved there. If you care.

One thing that I wish worked differently is that it splits its state between database (SQLite or Postgres) and disk. I kind of wish everything went into the database, so that can be backed up together with the rest of Postgres index, but beggars can't be choosers. I'll take it.