In the years following the Great Recession, from 2010 to 2013, many web services went offline. In retrospect that was the end of the Berners-Lee web.
During that time, starting in 12/29/2011, I started using Maciej Cegłowski's Pinboard bookmarking site as a kind of micro blog.
Pinboard filled part of the Google Reader Social vacuum. There were various apps and services around pinboard, in addition to IFTTT, that made that feasible. My Pinboard 's' posts were published to Twitter, then app.net, and most recently Mastodon (and probably a few other services too). They were also archived in kateva.org/sh.
Pinboard imported my old Google Reader social bookmarks so it's a pretty complete set of things I shared, mostly tech and events that seemed to have potential lasting meaning. There are over 50,000 pins now. There were apps written for Pinboard, creating a small ecosystem of added value.
I'm still on my original subscription plan - about $20 a year or so. It ends in Feb 2025 and I won't be renewing. I feel like it's 2013 again.
Over the past few years there have been a slowly increasing number of pinboard outages with less communication. While debugging the last outage I purged my local history from the 3rd party Pins iOS app and found that Pinboard was throttling their download API. I could download only 100 of my 50,000 or so pins. (It's still easy to download the whole set as a file).
That's ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of. His Pinboard.in support forum has been quiescent for years. I'll be researching my micro blog options and I'll write about what I come up with on tech.kateva.org.
10 years is an eternity on the web. Pinboard had a good run, but it too is passing. I have my archives and you can still download JSON or HTM versions of past bookmarks. I might wish for a more graceful end but Pinboard was a good service while it lasted and there is a clear data exit if not a clear replacement. Thank you, Maciej, for the value you delivered to me.
Update: via a Mastodon friend a Hacker News article on the ignominious end of Pinboard and some alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41533958
3 comments:
Another big outage: it looks like the API was down for 8+ hours last night. No info on the Pinboard twitter account or Pinboard blog.
I appreciate your blog. I found this post because I found myself yet again not knowing how to best sync my browsing (this could be easily solved by using one browser, but oh well).
Yet again I remembered of pinboard, but I was always afraid one day the one man show would end and it seems that day is finally arriving. Pity.
Another 9 hour outage on Oct 24. I don't want to turn these blog comments into the status log that Pinboard should have so I won't post again. But things aren't going great over there this month.
For anyone looking for alternatives Raindrop is popular as a hosted system. I'm looking at Linkding for self-hosting something.
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