Sad news, but trimming the fat is what people wanted Mozilla to do. Anyone know a good alternative to Fakespot? I absolutely don't trust amazon's own review summaries, and expect other alternatives would be for-profit data harvesters.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Pocket was silly, just use tabs and buy more RAM.
The point was to have stuff to read when no connection, such as airplane. Which browser doesn't try to refresh the tab? Any setting that allows to cache to HDD on a mobile browser you know of?
It did that? That's nifty. Maybe a little deliberate for me, personally, with my adhd, but I can see how that would be very useful. Kind've a bummer that's gone, actually. Shoot. And there are no decent and trustworthy alternatives?
You don’t need to. Modem browsers will suspend unused tabs, cache them on drive and free up the memory, while quickly restoring as soon user activate them. On at least moderately fast systems this happens so quickly it’s hardly noticeable.
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Nobody cared to use Pocket so its not surprising, btw what was that Fakespot thing?
I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product's reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an "adjusted" aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.
I'm going to miss fakespot. I don't know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.
Alternative? 11Labs Reader will let you build an article library and will read them to you with superior voicing then pocket ever had.
Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We've probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It's a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn't seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.
It tried to show how authentic a product review was
cant say if it was accurate or not
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The moment I setup an Omnivore account, it gets acquired and dies, the moment I switch to Pocket it's dead lol, I think I'll just move to some open source self hosted read it later app like Karakeep
No! Use your power for good! Switch to Facebook and X!
I know what I need to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it!
well shit, i loved pocket. i guess time to make my own del.icio.us social bookmarking/saving app like i've been wanting to for years.
Yeah I've been using pocket since it was Read It Later. I got shit in there going back about 15 years I guess I'll be exporting and finally going through lmao.
and finally going through
It's ok. Let them go <3 don't lie to yourself!
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I've been using raindrop.io for years now and highly recommend checking it out
As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.
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Switched to LibreWolf after seeing the message about Fakespot. It was a heavily used browser add-on I used almost religiously since 2020. Mozilla acquired them in 2023 and then did nothing with it, letting it die. I'm so tired of this bullshit.
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Really disappointed to lose Pocket. I am a big user of it and found it very convenient to save articles of interest as well as collecting anything that looked interesting that I might want to read. Have both the Android app and use it on the desktop.
Now I'm going to have to find a substitute.
I liked the concept but immediately thought "this is gonna get dropped eventually and I'll lose all the shit I saved". Looks like I was right.
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Pocket is the sort of shit that makes me embarrassed to recommend Firefox.
The real Pocket is the Google money they made along the way.
Mozilla has tried so many things: I wonder if anyone there has considered releasing and maintaining a browser. They might have some luck against Chrome.
Welp, I've taught my parents to use the fakespot site before doing a purchase on Amazon. Fakespot was never a perfect tool, but it was easy to use and better than not checking review quality at all.
Is this cause of the money they lost from the google thing?
Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn't the only one doing that.... I'm sure it had its users but I always found normal bookmarks to be more convenient.
Never even heard of Fakespot, though.
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YES! No more Pocket button sticking out like a sore thumb!
It literally takes 5 seconds to remove it.
But you can't remove pocket from firefox just disable it. Given that it wa also a close source binary blob that made firefox not completely open source I'm glad it's going.
No time, need to shit post
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Pocket goes hand in hand with procrastination.
From the 404media article on the subject:
The Distilled announcement post says the company made the choice to shut down these products because “it’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.” It also says the choice will allow Mozilla to “shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.” Which is what everyone wants: more AI bloat in their browsers.
(The monkey paw turns, and) we got our wish.
We did, internet! We killed Pocket!
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