You are the reason the tech state is awful nowadays

[retpolanne]

So, I moved to Omnivore because I wanted to get out of Mozilla's Pocket, which was my go-to read-it-later app.

I decided to move all my data from Pocket to Omnivore in hopes that one day I would maybe self-host it or something.

Then, yesterday, I tried to save a few tabs on my phone and today I realized that my tabs were missing...

Then I saw that Omnivore was shutting down in October and deleting all the data... what?

You see, I'm not into startup gossiping, so I didn't know, didn't care that Omnivore was getting sold. And that you were going to delete our data?

Now I have this dead cache of articles that I wanted to read on my phone and on the macOS app and I can't open it because This deployment is temporarily paused. you nuked your deployment.

We've been talking so much about big tech enshittification that we completely forgot that some projects have turned into shit as well. You basically gave no warning that this was going to happen. You don't care about the users. Why would we trust you? Why we would ever trust another read-it-later app? This is BS at a hard level.

Here's a song for you btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFE6qQ3ySXE

[Podginator]

Hi @retpolanne

I’d like to take some time to answer this, and use this as an opportunity to explain the project moving forward.

For clarities sake, I was not officially involved in the project before they got bought by ElevenLabs. I was a contributor and frequented the discord. But I had no official say in how the project shut down.

Firstly, I’d like to say that I totally understand your feelings. I also moved from Pocket to Omnivore, and invested a lot of time in getting it setup the way I liked. I even worked on projects to get it sent to my e-reader. I loved this project, and contributed to it. I was deeply saddened to see it shut down the cloud offering.

Whilst true that omnivores shutdown was quite sudden, emails were sent out to users and a big bar was placed at the top of the web app. The app stayed up much longer than the deadline given in those, and the team worked on creating a mechanism to export your stories - which other services built an import for.

What I think was missing - and what we’ve also seen in the discord - is that many people were app only users. In retrospect a story should have been forced into everyone’s inbox explaining the situation so that everyone could have adequate visibility into the situation.

As for lost stories I was investigating what could be done. - and for the moment it seems very little. I am going to reach out @jacksonh and see whether any backups of databases exist - and whether he’d be comfortable with me accessing them. If that is the case I am happy to run an export service for people using my own self hosted instance. I’d be skeptic al of this outcome - however. Data privacy was one of the primary concerns of the dev team

To tackle the other things you’ve brought up all I can offer is my perspective as a contributor - and a new admin for the self hosted version of this project. I don’t speak for the former devs.

The primary problem with a project like this is monetisation. The hosting costs were not the cheapest, and the dev team was very small. They were trying to figure out monetisation whilst also offering a free hosted service. When you mention enshittification this is the primary conflict at play.

How do you recoup money - whilst also being respectful to your users? Do you start limiting access to features that users have otherwise become accustomed to such as the TTL, PDF or RSS functionality? Do you hope that enough people are willing to support the project with minimal premium features? Do you offer advertising and promotion to certain publications?

I hope you can see that this is not a simple problem to solve. And I don’t know the answer either.

What I do know is that a lot of projects would not have opened themselves up the way omnivore did and provide a complete open source version, and method to self host.

It was not always simple to self host. As someone that worked on some features, I’m acutely aware of the complications of getting the project set up. Again, this is a constraint of the small dev team and competing interests and need to get money to continue the project.

But the truth is - the devs could have shut everyone down post buyout. Shut down the repo - and provided no future support. Instead, they looked for people who would be willing to take on some of the challenges - and supported them in creating a fully self host able version. That is commendable, even if the rest of this sucks.

There are now some guides to get up and running with self hosting. And I hope that if you liked the project you can follow along and get the functionality back that you enjoyed.

I’m not saying any of this to say that your feelings are invalid. It is frustrating that you lost your cache, and a part of your workflow. I originally left pocket because of how they fucked with their app making my experience a lot worse. And I was equally quite bitter about it.

I agree things could have been handled and communicated better.

I’d just air on the side of trying to understand the circumstances that lead to this, and try to understand that while it sucks the team could have gone full scorched earth and didn’t.

And straight up - I love lily Allen and I love that song :)