The End Times have come for the Pinboard bookmarking service

If anyone is interested into self-hosting their bookmarks service so that they don't suffer this again. Here is a list of interesting open source projects that provides that

- Linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

- Linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden

- Servas https://github.com/beromir/Servas

- Grimoire https://github.com/goniszewski/grimoire

- Hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder

- LinkAce https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/

- Readeck https://readeck.org/en/

- Shaarli https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

- Shirori https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

I asked him for my full archive download in October 2022, and having heard nothing back I wound up paying him another $39 to keep my archive from being deleted while I tried to get his attention.

I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January".

I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.

Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.

For people who didn't read the linked article: Pinboard is not shutting down, just the OP is tired with outages and unresponsiveness of the owner.

I have requested my full archive download a couple of times over the last year and haven't been able to get it, which stinks. I keep trying to figure out a migration plan, but it seems daunting, especially with so many archived bookmarks. I love the service and want to keep using it, but the inability to get a backup archive makes me nervous.

FWIW, Pinboard's founder is still actively commenting (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords) on HN as of 7 days ago.

I was a previous Pinboard customer. I've since moved to Linkding[0], a self-hosted solution, and highly recommend it. It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard but gives me much more confidence about the longevity of my bookmarks.

0. https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

It was murky but I did appreciate that they took over del.icio.us and sort of half made it available again. Regardless, a legend in the game.

It really depends on your needs. I use Pinboard on many different browsers and devices and I'm not really interested in running my own service. I'll happily pay for the full text archiving but I acknowledge it is not perfect. I have come to the conclusion if you want to retain full text copies of your bookmarks, you need to download the pages yourself. I have been using SingleFile extension but there is also a CLI available.

Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of "Don't be a free user" (1) is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it's in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn (2)). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn't sustain itself.

It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to market forces and operational challenges.

Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.

(1) https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

(2) https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+pinboard

I used pinboard for years until I started saving web pages as PDFs in my Dropbox folder. I got the idea from pinboard’s own archive feature.

there are plenty of good alternatives nowadays:

- https://raindrop.io/: Also a one-man show, but probably the best bookmarking tool out there.

- https://omnivore.app: Open source and support for newsletters.

For my use case though (I like to curate and share), I ended up building an app (https://fika.bar) to bundle bookmarking + RSS Reader + Blogging.

Check out Shaarli if you are open to self hosted options.

Like pinboard it feels old but in a good way (aka it is light on resources and has a limited featureset). However, I will say that I do not care to archive pages and just use the wayback machine for dead links instead.

I'm going to guess pinboard isn't dead, it's just been on the backburner. Idlewords (i.e. maciej) still comments on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33557751 (2022)

1. depression sucks 2. don't go on Twitter kids, it always ends badly 3. trusting a company with a bus factor of 1 is always risky

It was a surprise to me to discover that Maciej is actually the author behind the idlewords blog. He published this in May of this year: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

I still use pinboard every week. I also find it very interesting to follow what other people are pinning. There aren't many niche places to follow ONLY the notable links of other hackers.

I barely use it but when I do need to look something up it’s great. But conscious that it’s not super robust, I simply save bookmarks in Zotero now and that works even better on all counts.

I’m frankly impressed by how many people still use Pinboard! Like, when I pin some recent niche news article, Pinboard shows that other tens of people already did the same…

I still use it all the time and have been quite happy with it. I don't do the full-text archiving, though -- never been of interest to me.

I think I paid $5-10 for this as a one-time fee in December 2010. It was one of the best purchases ever. However, by mid-2022, I noticed issues, downtime, weird errors, etc., so I exported and moved on to raindrop.io after emailing support@pinboard.in and not hearing back.

I'm using bookmarkos.com and it serves my needs. The dev is responsive too.

Re: alternatives, there's also Linkhut: https://ln.ht/

The most I know about this company is the entertaining way in which he demonstrated that Hacker News polls for "who should we fund?" are going to have the same incentives as ones on Reddit. Good times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270

I thought it was really funny. You can't really ask a crowd where to put your money. They'll operate on their own incentives, not yours. And then get pissed off when you don't play along. The classic principal-agent problem but the agents are a mob.

Did Pinboard get bombed by HN?

> Error: Connection refused

check out Sublime - www.sublime.app - simple, beautiful, and communal, so you can discover the cool stuff other ppl are saving too.

Obligatory mention of https://raindrop.io/

I switched from Pinboard a year or more ago after using it for many years, mainly because I found the iPhone app and integration (eg share feature, to save bookmarks) to be flaky.

Raindrop has been great - imported seamlessly from Pinboard and the iPhone and Desktop app work well for me.

Ouch, I never knew my Pinboard data is at risk. Terrifying.

I too was a refugee from del.icio.us and signed up for ~$11 a year. I also declined the offer to "support" the platform for more $. One thing I DO like is the popular tab, I've found a ton of cool resources there. Just sayin.

I was early to sign up for pinboard, got the lifetime subscription at $11

I received an email from them asking me to move to a yearly subscription, although I could choose to decline

I chose to decline, mostly glad about the decision, I paid what was asked when I originally signed up