this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023

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Omnivore is an excellent open-source read-it-later alternative to Pocket, that can be self-hosted as well (beehaw.org)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I use read-it-later services extensively to save any news I want to do blog posts about later, or something I want to look at in more detail when I have time (and three monitors).

I had been self-hosting Wallbag for quite a while, and did a video about it too, but I had some issues re-installing it when I moved to Docker container hosting on my VPS.

Ominvore certainly looks very interesting, with a modern interface and quite a few useful features. I'm starting so long with their free cloud hosted service, and could register with ease, and even initiate an import from Pocket. They do have a docker-compose file for setting up containerised self-hosting, but I'm going to wait a bit just to see if that matures a bit, as it seems it is early days still and no proper guide has been completed yet for it.

Apart from the usual saving links for reading later, with tags, archiving, etc, it also supports a clutter-free reader view for easy reading without adverts. In the reading view you can also change formatting, highlight text, add/view notes (in a Notebook view), and track reading progress across all devices (each note also shows a yellow progress line on its tile view to indicate reading progress).

It also has a feature for subscriptions via e-mail. Omnivore can generate unique e-mail addresses you can use for subscribing to online newsletters, and it is intelligent enough to realise that if a mail contains a welcome message, note from the author, etc that will be forwarded by Omnivore to your main e-mail address (without exposing that to the newsletter service).

It also has integration with Logseq, Obsidian notes, webhooks, and more.

You can save links by adding them in the app, using a browser extension, or by using the share option on mobile devices and just selecting to share to the Omnivore app.

There is no price model yet set up for the service, but I'm pretty sure they'll have an ongoing useful free tier with their online service, and probably only charge for some more advanced functionality. There is always the self-hosted option too. But for now, this looks very functional and useful to me, and I've started using it.

See https://omnivore.app/

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Anyone else remember Mozilla promising to open source Pocket 6 years ago?

As a result of this strategic acquisition, Pocket will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Corporation and will become part of the Mozilla open source project.

Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-pocket/

P.S. Sorry for out of topic comment.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hell I remember when it was called Read It Later, long before the Pocket days. Back when it was good lol.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I miss del.icio.us. Simpler times.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Now, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time... A long time.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Aren't you glad you stumbleupon it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Missing it too, it was awesome! Readitlater/pocket was just an okayish replacement. Now I'm just too lazy to replace it with something self hosted.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I lost so many bookmarks when delicious went down

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

@davehtaylor @sik0fewl you mean destroyed by Yahoo

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have an upvote from me. I dumped pocket and started using this instead. It's simpler, cleaner and easier to use. I also reported a web page that wouldn't save properly, it was just an URL without any header or text.

Within about 48 hours, after reporting the link, it saved as a proper page of text. I like to think they fixed it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

That's good to hear as I had about 40 links that related to two sites, one has a cloudflare authentication, and the other a verification for out of country access (I think). Hoping they can be fixed. I can understand that is problematic to have an automated text retriever passing tests like that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Been using Omnivore for several months now with no issues! Really clean, easy to use, and cross-platform.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I was impressed that their Android app is slick and works really well.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I like omnivore a bunch. That said, I'm back on Wallabag simply for the great integration with my RSS reader of choice: Miniflux. Once you've set up the api "handshake" its just a click of the save button in Miniflux then it schwoops over to Wallabag. So great.

I have a docker compose for Wallabag that works perfectly every time I can post if it helps. Once I sanitize the juicy IPs and domain name, that is. And when I say it works everything, realize that I've done it like 8 times because when I'd pooch my VPS OS, I'd nuke it and start over.

EDIT: Here's the docker-compose I use and it works repeatedly. Which, shit, I'm not ashamed because I'm still learning. But took me a long time to hunt down one that was easy to copy/paste into the .yml and docker-compose up and there ya go. NOTE: One thing that stumped me for a long time was the jacked up launch page after install. If it looks like broken HTML its because you put either an IP or a bad/fake domain name in the compose file. So make sure you have a domain name for it. Also, Wallabag is pretty cheap to have them host. I think its like $17/yr. But for now I'm selfhosting it on a cheap VPS.

version: '3'
services:
  wallabag:
    image: wallabag/wallabag
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=wallaroot
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_DRIVER=pdo_mysql
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_HOST=db
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PORT=3306
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_NAME=wallabag
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_USER=wallabag
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PASSWORD=wallapass
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_CHARSET=utf8mb4
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX="wallabag_"
      - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_HOST=127.0.0.1
      - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_USER=~
      - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_PASSWORD=~
      - [email protected]
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DOMAIN_NAME=https://your.domain.tld
      - SYMFONY__ENV__SERVER_NAME="Cool Name here"
    ports:
      - "8585:80"
    volumes:
      - /opt/wallabag/images:/var/www/wallabag/web/assets/images
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "wget" ,"--no-verbose", "--tries=1", "--spider", "http://localhost"]
      interval: 1m
      timeout: 3s
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
  db:
    image: mariadb
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=wallaroot
    volumes:
      - /opt/wallabag/data:/var/lib/mysql
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "mysqladmin" ,"ping", "-h", "localhost"]
      interval: 20s
      timeout: 3s
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "redis-cli", "ping"]
      interval: 20s
      timeout: 3s

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Just checking but hopefully these are not the passwords you are using, right?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Right.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks very much for that docker file. Yes I tried it about 2 years back, and I think Docker was not really an option then (or an easy one). I know what you mean by the RSS reader integration as I was using that with Wallabag. I'll need to have a good look at the two again I think. Omnivore is still very new so not much 3rd party support, although they have an API and some webhook integration.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I think it is the best FOSS option out there, but the integration won me over. If that ever changes I'll switch back immediately.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

I’ve been using a personal discord server to *save all the things I want to read, watch, or look at later

Edit: no idea how Dave found his way into this comment

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Discord is not FOSS and is a privacy nightmare.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

This is true, but it’s not like I’m stuffing sensitive thing in there. It was a lazy alternative to this and the best I had a few years ago

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

So with sub-channels and then dragging and dropping between them? I suppose existing Discord users may try that. I'd be interested to hear if many others are using Discord in that way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I have a personal Discord server that I drop links into - fully intending to get them out of Discord and into my notes someday, though let’s just say I’m quite behind on that.

Mostly I find it useful because I can drop a link on from my phone and quickly access it from my PC, or vice versa. There is some organization into channel types (food, music, games, etc) but these days I just use a general channel as a dumping ground and figure I’ll sort later, ha.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I've used it as personal notes for various things, like music or hobbies.

However any OC does not, I don't want discord to own my work in perpetuity. I've mostly moved away from discord for that, though still use it with friends. (can't find a better chat-party stream alternative)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Can't you just do that with a Google doc?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

i generally junk my telegram saved messages

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I have the app, but haven't really used it much. I put most things into my linkding instance and forget about it. Lol.

Maybe I should start with Omnivore first to keep from clogging up my bookmarks.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I just wish TTS was available on other platforms since I'm not an iOS user

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Which platform are you on? Hopefully this helps, https://readaloud.app/

PS. There's a mantra that says is best to have multiple simple tools doing one thing well than just one doing everything. It's been in computing since the early days of Unix.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Thank you for that one! I just loved the idea of being able to listen to an article I am interested than reading so if it was a feature of the app. I use android/windows/ubuntu mainly

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Another happy user here, the Android app is still a tad rough but perfectly usable and it's a great experience overall. The Logseq (+Obsidian iirc) integration is quite nice too. I should give hosting it myself a go sometime...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Android app and browsers extentions are propietary, take note on that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is this not the code though for the Android app at https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/tree/main/android/Omnivore

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Ah there it is, couldn't find because of the placement. Thank you :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

This looks really good! Thanks for suggesting this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Do they have offline support on desktop? I would expect it to be a key functionality of any read it later app, and yet can't find any that that does.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I put my Android phone on plane mode, shut the app and reopened it, and yes I could read the full content when opening each article.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Thanks, but I was asking specifically for desktop. Most apps do have offline support for mobile, but never desktop for some reason

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

there is such a thing bookmarks, check it out in your spare time

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago

My bookmarks only save a title and link - no tags to group, no full text content, no unread indication. So, how would one use bookmarks in a meaningful way? I could use a piece of paper too, but it's not the best way for me.