• by xz18r on 10/29/2024, 5:13:32 PM

    I was already wondering why development on Omnivore was halted…

    This isn’t good news at all for Omnivore users. It made me legitimately consider switching away from my self-hosted Wallabag instance because everything looked so sleek and promising; in terms of read-it-later apps, it really held the promise of the big next thing (as far as that can apply to such a “simple” category).

    I’m not sure if articles read aloud is the thing that Omnivore users are looking for, per se. Ah well, they’ll know why they did it…

    On a side note:

    > All Omnivore users will be able to export their information from the service through November 15 2024, after which all information will be deleted.

    Just me or is that extremely short notice? That’s in 2 weeks…

  • by bsnnkv on 10/30/2024, 2:24:01 AM

    After many years wasted on RIL apps, probably one of the best lifestyle changes I made was to adopt a "read it now or read it never" (RINORIN) approach[1].

    I'm still very happy with RINORIN + archiving the interesting bits of what I read in the moment[2].

    [1]: "If it's not immediately interesting enough for me to read when I see it, I just let it ago, trusting that if it's important enough, I'll be exposed to it again sooner or later, and at that point it'll be interesting enough for me to read it when I see it." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38355803)

    [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697228

  • by freeqaz on 10/29/2024, 9:20:09 PM

    Damn they're giving under 3 weeks to export before you lose all of your data? That's insane! If I were on an extended vacation and missed this, my data would be gone when I get back.

    They _really_ should increase that to be longer! Switch to read-only, but give at least 3-6 months to export. That's crazy otherwise

  • by bberenberg on 10/29/2024, 9:07:45 PM

    For what it’s worth I’ve contacted them to see if they would be open to handing over the hosted version. The current answer is no, based in part on wanting to delete user data. I suggested I could take it without data and users could reimport their data post handover. If you’d like to see this happen send them an email and voice your support.

  • by darrmit on 10/29/2024, 8:56:37 PM

    Ugh this is the only read-it-later service I ever found that "stuck". It was so simple and good. This sucks.

  • by jamil7 on 10/29/2024, 8:36:31 PM

    I built and ran a read it later app in the iOS app store for a few years as a side project. I found it pretty difficult to monetise and the support burden got to me. I eventually just pulled it from the store as I was getting emails and reviews and felt I couldn’t really give it the attention it needed. I saw quite a few competitors coming and going over the years, either through acquisitions or developers just losing interest. It seems like a difficult thing to make work sustainably.

  • by thylacine222 on 10/29/2024, 7:04:30 PM

    this really sucks, it's by far the best reader app out there. Hoping that people will be able to figure out a straightforward way to do self-hosting, because I would be willing to use the app as it is right now forever.

  • by dmje on 10/29/2024, 11:18:07 PM

    I use Raindrop[0] for all bookmarks and have flirted with Omnivore and Wallabag over the years. But I always come back to just using Raindrop and "Unsorted" for my read-it-laters. I've got a feed into Reeder from here which works well too. At the end of the day a likely next step after reading something is to want to bookmark it so this workflow works well for me.

    [0] https://raindrop.io/

  • by petemir on 10/29/2024, 10:16:03 PM

    I have not tested them yet, but (actually) self-hosted potential alternatives: linkwarden [0], hoarder [1]

    [0] https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden

    [1] https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder

    Edit: fixed wording

  • by raindropm on 11/5/2024, 3:14:22 PM

    Great, and I just recently move from Pocket a couple of months ago because I love how clean Omnivore is. Seems you can't escape the impermanence of digital life, so certain that it even rival death and taxes.

  • by dod9er on 10/29/2024, 5:30:37 PM

    Too bad... I also really liked it and used. Seems like I go for wallabag again. Maybe it will be possible to selfhost omnivore at some point in time ?!

  • by Phlogi on 10/30/2024, 8:42:32 PM

    Here is a script to convert your exported omnivore into an importable wallabag format: https://gist.github.com/Phlogi/f96a5ca0d65d5264df1fe636a8aac...

  • by Than3s on 10/30/2024, 1:39:25 PM

    What would be your recommendation for best parsing? I've found Omnivore really reliable, definitely much better than Readwise Reader (which can't even show Youtube videos in article afaik)

  • by Carbon1603 on 10/29/2024, 7:33:13 PM

    So, where to go next?

  • by raybb on 10/29/2024, 7:00:00 PM

    Ugh anyone have a rundown of how good the parsing is on wallabag vs instapaper vs pocket (or something else)?

  • by novoreorx on 10/30/2024, 8:43:28 AM

    Is there any chance that Omnivore's features will be shipped to ElevenReader?

  • by andreagrandi on 10/29/2024, 4:01:09 PM

    Thanks for making the code base open source

  • by lxgr on 10/29/2024, 6:45:17 PM

    tl;dr: They got acqui-hired and are shutting the app and service down.

    Ugh, it was so good!

    Self-hosting it seems quite complicated, though. I really hope somebody will step up and offer a hosted version of it.