I am a fairly satisfied Pocket customer, but it’s always fun to mess around with potential alternatives. Wallabag is one such alternative. It is, er, very much like Pocket, but you host it yourself. It might be I have found a self-hosting frontier, though. I have Linkding, which is very pinboard-like and more to my taste for bookmark management generally, but I need to experiment with a few of its integrations to see if maybe it can do everything I want.

Installation on my Synology was pretty easy. I followed a Docker recipe, plumbed it into my reverse proxy, and it’s … fine? Very Pocket-like. There’s an iOS app. There are Firefox apps. It provides custom Atom feeds for your new, unread, archived, and starred items. It also provides public URLs to items you’ve saved to share with others, which is considerate. You can write rules to label your content based on domain, URL, title, reading time, and more.

I like the custom Atom feeds, because you can just subscribe to them in an RSS reader and you have access to a cleanly formatted full-text version in your reader, so you don’t have to use Wallabag to read your stuff.

Wallabag and Calibre

You can also subscribe to those feeds in Calibre, which will make a daily digest epub suitable for reading on an e-reader. With my Calibre-Web/Kobo integration, I can recreate the Kobo/Pocket integration by making Wallabag “books” that appear in Calibre-Web and sync to my Kobo.

Is it important to not use Pocket anymore? I don’t think so? I don’t mind replacing pinboard.in because I’m not super sure about its future. Pocket seems fine and I don’t ever treat RIL services as an important long-term storage thing. I tend to get to my list pretty quickly or use a skill I developed of just deleting stuff when I realize I don’t really want to read it anymore.

The Kobo integration is what makes it seem most compelling, but it could be I can manage that with Linkding’s RSS feeds, as well. I need to make a news download for Calibre and test.

In the meantime, Wallabag also has an API, so I will see about repurposing my Linkding Newsboat plugin to use my Wallabag instance with Newsboat.