Mozilla Takes Pocket Out Back

7-minute read
mozilla • pocket • open-source • reading

The Background

A little bit of history here to start, just so that we can get some facts straight. Pocket started out primarily as a read-it-later service. In fact, it used to literally be called “Read It Later”.

This is a service that has a web scraper that’s tuned to be able to extract articles from webpages. It allowed people to save copies of articles, blog posts, and even Twitter (the social media contemporarily known as X) posts for later reading.

As long as you had synced your pocket app on whatever device, you could use the Pocket app to read whatever you had saved offline.

The Acquisition

In 2017, Mozilla and Pocket had announced that the former had acquired the latter. At the time, the promise had been to fully open source the product. But since the Pocket team was, and still is, so small, it would be years before any part of that promise would be fulfilled.

What would follow would be a hard pivot from the original purpose of Pocket was an effort from Mozilla to focus on “content curation”. This somewhat makes sense considering the amount of analytics you can gain from what people are saving in their own Pocket accounts and use that to filter out high quality content among the noise.

Some folks may have even got their big breaks because of this curation effort. Publisher John Steele of the Nautilus science magazine said back in 2023 that “Pocket often accounts for more than 20% of the monthly web traffic.” It’s not unconscionable to take that and extrapolate that this effort mattered greatly to some people.

The Source?

Many folks were foaming at the mouth, looking to get their hands on Pocket’s source code. Some wanted to self-host the (at the time) one-of-a-kind service. Some wanted to be able to re-use part of the product, namely the scraper, to integrate into their own unrelated product. Others, like myself, wanted to be able to use Pocket without feeling a sense of guilt.

Now, my views over the years have changed on this topic but at one point I would feel a great sense of guilt over using a service or product that wasn’t free and open source software. To some degree I still feel that in my day to day today, but for more nuanced reasons.

At the time of the Pocket acquisition, using the service had become a source of that guilt as I began to appreciate it more and more. So I loosely followed the progress (or lack thereof due to them being a small team). Unfortunately it was a fools errand, even with the multiple attempts at getting some sort of timeline on the effort.

The Disclaimer

Before I continue, I’d like to point out that I hold no delusions about the fact that Pocket and their team have been working hard on the product and that they care about doing their job right.

My gripes henceforth relate to the capitalistic motivations of individuals in certain leadership positions and the destroying of a great service for financial gain.

The Shotgun

On May 22nd, 2025, Mozilla announced the shuttering of Pocket. In my opinion, the reasoning behind it is just as vague and hand-wavey as any company in Big Tech would employ. In their words, “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved”.

“the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved”.

While that may somewhat be true, today an internet connection is about as ubiquitous (and sometimes more so) than water fountains, the desire to be able to disconnect from the constant distractions and barrages of stimulation are stronger than ever.

The announcement continues with a little bit of self-congratulatory listing of achievements that quickly glosses over the roots of the app (a tool to read articles offline).

  • Expanded high-quality content recommendations to more than a dozen countries and five languages.
  • Connected tens of millions of people across the world with stories worth their time and attention.
  • Earned recognition including a Webby Award for “Best of Pocket: 2020” and an Anthem Award in 2023 for supporting local journalism.
  • Published hundreds of curated collections on topics from fighting algorithmic bias to rethinking happiness.

Thankfully those who have carefully curated their own collections of articles and blog posts will be able export everything until October 8th of this year. Of course the Pocket Hits newsletter isn’t going away! Their newsletter of newsletters will continue operating under a different name.

What baffles me here though is where’s the data for that curation going to be coming from once Pocket closes? Have Mozilla maybe started tracking statistics about news articles through the bookmarking system in Firefox?

In an attached blog post including news of the Pocket shutdown, Mozilla says this:

Meanwhile, new features like Tab Groups and enhanced bookmarks now provide built-in ways to manage reading lists easily.

I’m not going to go all conspiracy theorist and say that Mozilla’s tracking your web browsing, but it wouldn’t be impossible for them to use analytics that folks have opted into to help tune the methods they’ve got for curating their Pocket Hits newsletter. On the Pocket farewell page they call these methods “algotorial” (a portmanteau of algorithmic and editorial).

The Kicker

I think the thing that set my rage meter pinned to 100% on this one though has to be how the Mozilla blog post opens:

Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire and our independence shapes everything we build.

Except that’s so far from true it’s almost laughable. While Firefox doesn’t directly receive funding from Google, Mozilla Foundation/Technologies/whatever, definitely does and that goes towards influencing the fact that the default search engine on Firefox for any new install is Google. Moreover, the “sponsored” links for Firefox on a new tab for any new install seem to be Amazon, Expedia, and Hotels.com.

So maybe you’re not backed by a billionaire, you’re actually backed by multiple. You see how that’s worse, Mozilla, right? You’re a bunch of billionaires’ sugar baby.

The Confession

I actually stopped using Pocket a few years ago when I noticed less and less articles being properly saved for offline reading. Half of the articles would start just redirecting to the webpages themselves instead of allowing me to read them in a distraction-free environment. I couldn’t actually use Pocket for the main purpose I had sought it out for in the first place.

At some point I would normally be reading the articles on my phone, I would then end up having to deal with incessant ads reformatting the articles every time they would re-load. I would have viewports shrank to maybe two paragraphs because there would be “open this article in our app” banners, and banner ads at the bottom. It was a horrible experience and I don’t understand how folks get around the internet without an adblocker most of the time.

Worse-still, once I got an eReader the articles that redirected me to the webpage would not download to said device. Since Pocket never actually fetched those articles (my theories behind why range from technical to monetarily conspiratorial), they could not be read offline on the device that I now preferred to read articles from. I would save a bunch of articles for the week and sync my Kobo before leaving on a trip or for the day just to find out that half the things I had been itching to read were not even downloaded!

The Conclusion

While one could look at what’s been open sourced by Pocket today and ask for more, I think it would simply fall on deaf ears. The Pocket product being shut down likely also means that on October 8th (or shortly after), the Pocket team will either be reshuffled into another part of the organization, or those who aren’t interested in that will leave the company altogether.

The truth of the matter is that the landscape today is far different than what it was back then. Since then there are multiple alternatives to pocket that have come (and go). There are multiple options to self-host and multiple options that are already hosted for you.

Here are a few of the contenders I think might be worth looking at:

  • *Wallabag - I wrote an article here about how to connect your Kobo eReader to it
  • Readwise - highlighted by @andyw8 who started the Open Pocket initiative
  • *Omnivore - While the hosted service is defunct, you can still self-host.
  • *ArchiveBox - A little less shiny, but very powerful!

* Self-hostable

The Sources