On July 8 2025, Pocket shut down. It was the end of an era, and appropriately a lot has been written about Pocket’s meaning to readers, and to the early web.
I always wanted to be an ardent Pocket user. But to my mind, something was fundamentally broken in Pocket, because it did nothing to actually help you read all the articles you saved.
Obviously, when Pocket closed down, a friend and I tried to vibecode a Pocket replacement. We got pretty far, but our lack in hosting B2C web apps eventually prevented us from shipping anything. If you’re still looking for similar software, check out Readeck. Some people like Matter or Readwise. (And now of course, you can roll your own: it’s amazing how much vibecoding has improved in just 6 months.)
That app we tried to create was based on my idiosyncratic workflow, which is aimed, primarily and most importantly, at the reading part. Finding articles online is easy; what the app solved was turning that collection into something you could read. We also had ideas for what would come next: email digests, collecting notes, and then finally a blogging engine. Maybe some day.
But what I do currently (and had been doing even when Pocket was still around) is much dumber and easier to maintain than having a custom software solution. I just use a browser and a printer. I find articles through RSS and newsletters, which I then save as .pdf in your browser’s Reader mode (to cleanse out all the ads and banners). And then I print out little collections of articles when I feel like it.
It’s really as dumb as that, and nothing has surpassed it yet. It enables concentrated reading ánd thinking, which feeds into my writing habit.
Reading on paper: any serious ‘read it later’ app should start with that, as I argued here. The smartphone can be great for finding material, and for ‘consumption’ – but any reading worth anything is not consumption but creation in it self.