Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?
From Pinboard's Twitter mentions, I can see I'm not the only one who has been trying to contact Maciej for several months without success. A lot of former delicious users are also desperate to get an export of their data, which is still unavailable over a year and a half after Pinboard purchased and shut down the site.
Overall, it's left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I decided in September to leave the service, but emailing is the only way to request a full download of archived bookmarks. I'd also like to get a refund on the next four years of my archival subscription - I paid for five years in advance because I was so happy with the site before now.
I know Maciej reads HN, and there seem to be a number of Pinboard users here (it's still mentioned just about anytime somebody posts about bookmarking). Has anybody else had any luck getting a refund and a copy of their data? What are the best Pinboard replacements, self-hosted or otherwise?
43 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadI've had good performance and uptime with Pinboard, but there have been a few moments that caused me to look outward for other options, but there I found that nobody else really focused on privacy the same way.
Nowadays, though, self-hosting is much more workable than it used to be and I feel more confident that I can manage my own data safely... or maybe I've just realized I'm not confident that anybody else can.
He never answered when I contacted him for pinboard support, leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.
Maciej seems to be more interested in discussing politics on Twitter rather than fixing his service, therefore I plan to leave his service once I find a good alternative.
Requires Alfred, which I think is fairly common!
If I was to take a total guess I would say the archiving service might be getting abused for mass data scraping, and the archive servers are buckling under load. Scraping can use a fair amount of server resources.
I'm afraid I can't answer your first question, but I can answer your second one. historious has been around since 2009 and, while I don't give it amazing amounts of love, it works well enough that I use it myself. I am currently trying to modernize it a bit, but I don't have an ETA or roadmap on that. However, I think it's worth giving it a shot.
The feature I miss most from pinboard is tag suggestions in the extension/bookmarklet, and perhaps a little popup that gives you a chance to change the title/description.
> What happens if the guy who runs Pinboard gets hit by a bus?
> The bus is likely to be fine. They don't go very fast and are designed with passenger safety in mind.
I did get a download of my data, albeit it took a while, after requesting it from my settings page.
I've never had a reply to any of my emails to him. Alhough I did eventually get a reply on twitter, which said "Sorry for the terrible support" But then I heard nothing more, and got no replies to further emails either.
I think he's too busy being a celebrity. And it's a shame because he was kind of a figure head for independents doing a good job, and I was a bit of an evangelist. Oh well.
I've voted Democrat in every election, this isn't a political thing. I'm embarrassed by his very public lack of self-awareness, and upset for people who trusted him.
[1] https://twitter.com/Pinboard [2] https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1050583549164703744
Besides the service being provided to customers, Maciej owes anyone feeling entitled to more nothing.
I don't check how quickly the cached copies are created after bookmarking. All i knows is that they're there when the site has disappeared. He's got about 7.8GB of stuff stored for me and i've been happy with the service.
I've got thousands of carefully-tagged bookmarks in there, and add more every day. I dread the idea of having to switch to another service, and after evaluating several others—haven't found any that come close.
What are people here switching to? Or am I an out of touch old geezer for even thinking that saving bookmarks is a useful thing anymore...
It's not perfect, and no archiving yet, but it's in active development
It's obvious that Maciej has put all his attention into political campaigning over the last year - good on him! But the pinboard blog hasn't been updated since 18 months, and the quality of its minimal-by-design service starts eroding.
I really do hope he can clarify here or on his blog what's the future plan for pinboard. I always liked pinboard being very down to earth with the marketing, but that's no excuse for ignoring the paying customer base.
Those archiving blackouts hit me regularly, every few months I sent him an email, he makes it work again (only for a while), and the cycle repeats itself.
I‘m astonished he seems to have no form of monitoring, a canary account or whatever.
I‘m not ready to jump ship, but yes, the service doesn‘t feel so dependable nowadays.
I mainly use it for discovering new content via "popular" tab and my own hacky chrome extension to filter "recent" bookmarks and display those with N number of users who bookmarked the same link.
Sure it could use with some much needed updates to both the site and the api at some point once Maciej saves the American political system eventually.
It does seem like browser bookmarks is the safest bet.