Choosing a Pocket replacement, and actually reading what you save

Justin Pot has used read-later apps for about 15 years and screened more than 20, separating dedicated read-later tools from bookmarkers and note apps. Ignore the 2017 byline; it's the original post date, and the guide has been updated since.

A five-second self-test matches your main complaint (missing Pocket, heavy highlighting, self-hosting, saving what you'll never read) to a specific app. The author built Burn 451 and discloses it, so treat that recommendation as a vendor's.

Omnivore was free and popular until its team was acquired and the app went offline; Molodtsov argues the free tier is why it failed. Read it before you pick: he also warns that "open source" only means the code is public.

Readeck is one Go binary with EPUB export and OPDS feeds for e-readers; Wallabag needs three containers but has native mobile apps and more importers. The table lists Readeck's Pocket import as HTML, so check your file's format before choosing.

Explains what's in the ZIP Mozilla issued: a CSV of links, titles, dates, tags and status, with no article text. Written by Textivore, which pitches its own importer, but it also says the CSV loads into Instapaper, Raindrop, Matter and Wallabag.

Spends 30 days with three self-hosted apps and judges them on behavioral friction instead of feature checklists. Linkwarden, the most feature-rich, isn't the winner: the app that got him reading is the one that, in his words, doesn't do much.

Argues a "to read" list is a to-do list in disguise, and uses her Goodreads challenge, which turned from a reading goal into a kill count, as proof that finishing isn't retaining. Includes a copy-paste prompt for reading less and keeping more.

Sapna holds more than 17,000 Readwise highlights she can't describe, and links the guilt of her overflowing reading list to the aspirational selves each save was meant to build. It's the gentlest take here, written from an ADHD perspective.

Rossi treats information as food, asking what your reading diet is made of, then builds a four-step "pirate" framework starting with Aim (define your sources) and Receive (create your inbox). It suits a rotting queue because it starts upstream of the app.

Saikat Basu juggled Instapaper, browser bookmarks and a notes app, then built a Reading Inbox folder in Obsidian on the Web Clipper; his argument is that saving without processing creates backlog, not knowledge. Suits people who already live in notes.

Jirák triages about 50 incoming articles daily on a Mac, using NetNewsWire and a local Ollama model to summarize each so it gets a verdict: read deeply, skim or discard. He doesn't read them all, and he argues against his own system.