What I’m doing for bookmarks now that Pocket is dead

Pocket was a pretty great little app. It let you save articles, read them later, tag them etc. I used it because it was integrated with my Kobo ebook reader, so I could save stories and read them on that. But then Mozilla unceremoniously killed it.

I wouldn’t have minded so much except that I’m using the API to power the bookmarks section of mywebsite. I was using it to share articles I find particularly interesting, and there’s an RSS feed for the particularly adventurous. But that’s been broken for the last little while.

I migrated over to Instapaper since that seemed to be the reliable alternative, but their API has a manual human approval process, and I’m neither patient nor confident enough that will succeed.

So I had a new idea: what if I just use the Mastodon API to return posts that have a specific hashtag. This way I can share links on socials, it’s much easier than having another third party app, and the Mastodon API deals with fetching all the title and metadata about the article.

Long story short I gave Kilo Code some specs and it built an implementation that searches the Mastodon API for posts matching any post from me with the hashtag #link (just searches for “#link from:@ash“), then it grabs the metadata and hashtags from the API, and merges those into my existing bookmarks.json file that runs the whole thing.

I’m not going to post code because you can probably write something more to your liking. But I thought the concept was cool, and now I’m thinking about other possibilities, like having a music recommendations playlist that pulls from my posts in the #NowListening `hashtag.

I saw this post on BlueSky the other day and it tickled me slightly. And I was reminded of it because in a way, that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Using loosely marked up socials as the backend.

BlueSky and YouTube are down at the same time. This is because, to save money on storage costs, BlueSky just saves all our posts as comments on one kid’s middle school science fair presentation in 2011 (he lost)

Daniel Feldman @ bsky