wallabag, I choose you!

Two months ago, when Mozilla announced the unfortunate shutdown of Pocket, I wrote about alternatives. In that post, I listed 8 alternatives with varying feature sets to look into based on my own research and recommendations from others. I wanted to follow up on that now that I’ve chosen my new tool to use.

I decided to go with the hosted solution, started with a 14-day trial and somewhere around midway the trial I decided to continue with it and paid the 30 e/year support subscription as that’s a small price to pay and I want to support the tools I use.

Back in May, I wrote this about wallabag:

I like how focused it is. It’s matching all the four requirements that I have and they don’t try to be anything else. Reading through their GitHub issues it also seems they are commited to building a good and focused software instead of trying to cram all the possible ideas into the app.

I ended up choosing it as my first one to test and never looked back. It fit my needs very well and has been a joy to use.

How does it match my needs

I had four main needs for the tool:

First, I need it to have a mobile app or mobile Firefox extension: something where I can easily save a page directly from the browser without copy-pasting stuff. Using the Share functionality is fine.

wallabag has a mobile app that quickly rose to my “recently used” listing in the share dialog. As it’s there on the first spot when I hit share, it’s quick and easy to get things added to the read it later list even when I’m in a hurry. They also have a good browser extension that once configured, needs nothing more than a click and the article is saved.

Second, I want a reader on both Android and iOS that sync my saved articles to offline use. I’m often in a situation where I have no access to Internet and for those moments, Pocket has been wonderful.

I haven’t had a lot of use for the mobile apps yet as I haven’t been traveling this summer but from the little I’ve used them, they fit my needs perfectly. The articles sync to the phone and are available offline.

Same with the iPad app, although it hasn’t been quite as up to date with the sync as I see my phone being. It’s not a problem though as I can make sure to sync the articles before heading offline. (This might also be because of my settings and not the app itself, I haven’t investigated.)

Third, I want this functionality to be the main focus of the product/service, not an afterthought or cash grab by a company building a million other things.

So far so good. Everything I’ve seen from the people behind it, the focus is right where I want it to be. And since it’s open source and self-hostable, if they ever start moving to another direction, there’s the possibility of not following.

Fourth, like I mentioned, I don’t care about recommendations and related, I also don’t want any AI bullshit there because that usually tells me their focus is on something very different than what I care about.

It’s been perfect in this regard as well. No push for stupid “AI” features, no recommendations being pushed to my face when I want to read my articles.

How I use it

I save two types of articles to wallabag:

1. Articles I see are interesting but I don’t have time or interest to read right away. The classic “read it later” use case
2. Articles I finished reading and want to store and make notes about in my notes system

I didn’t migrate any of my old Pocket-saved articles into wallabag for that reason. I did export them and saved them on my computer for the off chance that I’d want to revisit my list but since I have made notes of all the interesting ones there as well, I didn’t feel I’d miss out on anything by starting fresh.

Best of all, wallabag functions effectively as a drop-in replacement to Pocket. There was not a single day during this transition where I felt “I wish I had Pocket still” or had a moment where I had to learn something new or change how I use these tools. That’s been a great relief as these tools are very important to my flow.