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What confidential magic can they have in a bookmarking tool that they need to protect?
Calling it (or instapaper) a bookmarking tool is rather underselling what they're doing. They're not a list of URLs for you to find later (possibly repeatedly).
They're not? That's how I've been using them (with the handy add-on that my ereader automatically downloaded them for longer articles.

What else is there?

> Opened 5 years ago Closed 4 years ago

And then crickets for 3 years...

That doesn't seem quite true... the first comment here links to open pocket which links to a discussion in a github ticket with the previously closed source pocket team where they note they are a small team and just have not had a lot of bandwidth to cleanup the formerly closed source server. That discussion was last summer.

https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75...

This comment in particular.

I still don't see the advantage of pocket over bookmarks.
It downloads the bookmarked content, it allows you to organise it with tags and such, and archive it. And it's cross platform ( i can save an article on my computer and it will be downloaded on my phone).

I consider it more a distributed to-read list than a bookmark manager.

If you have a Kobo e-reader, you can sync the articles to read them offline on an eInk display.

It keeps track of what you read.

It has more context when browsing, instead of just the website's title.

There's more to it.

I don't use it these days, but when I was heavily commuting on the London tube I used it a lot.

Pocket is an offline reader (and content reformatter), like instapaper, it's a rather different use case than bookmarks.

I don't bookmark articles I intend to read, but I do shove them in pocket, from where I can access them later then mark them as read.

It used to have text-to-speech functions. I even made lo-fi hip-hop type music using Pocket.
https://closetab.email is an open source bookmarking system, built for people who bookmark links and forget them forever. It automatically delivers an email digest of bookmarked links every monday to your inbox.
No surprise this hasn't been completed. The Pocket team has lost key people to the greater Mozilla org, and to other companies. Unless someone's comp is tied to completing this, it won't get done.
I would like to know what engine they use to fetch the text of the article from URL? That technology is neat.
I think this[0] comes close to what is used to extract text from an HTML document. Fetching can be done via any HTTP client. Will need jsdom to convert the text to DOM before feeding it to readability.

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability

Thanks for sharing. Given the description, it can also be used as back-end for build link preview, like FB.
What I miss from Pocket and not found on Instapaper: Full Webpage "archival"/download instead of the reader mode. Instapaper's reader mode doesn't work with HN/Twitter. I'm aware of Polar (haven't tried it though). But is there another alternative? Or is it possible to self-host/build a similar thing?
Integrating Pocket to Firefox and showing the trending news on new tabs is one of the best decisions Mozilla has ever made.

I gets me the news I like, from the sources I trust. Has anyone checked out how much of it is personal recommendation based on the saves or is it just majority of Firefox/Pocket users share common interests?