As time passes and EU-based users find themselves waiting in vain on word from Instapaper’s owners, our thoughts inevitably turn towards replacing Instapaper:
I chose Pinboard, not because it is the most slick service – it is very minimalist – but because it works, and for everything I read, it will likely be there for as long as I pay them to be.
The thing is, Pinboard is terrific at storing and organising a list of bookmarks, but that’s only part of what Instapaper was good for: it’s the other half of the process – the seamless storage of articles so that my queue of unread items was available (offline if I wanted it) to read at a moment’s notice – that I’m missing. As far as I can see, the solution the linked article proffers, ReadPaperback, is entirely an online solution to the reading-a-stripped-back-to-readable-text-version-of-an-article problem that Instapaper used to solve so nicely for me.[note]I know that Safari offers Reading List, but I often want to access articles as lunchtime when I’m at work, where I’m well away from the Apple ecosystem and I find myself using an extension-less, well out of date version of Firefox under Windows 10 to do my reading.[/note] Perhaps that’s the best we can do in Instapaper’s absence, but it’s not really solving the problem I wanted solved.
The prolonged silence from Instapaper’s current owners makes me wonder what, precisely, they were doing with our Instapaper user accounts that a) was at risk of bringing down the wrath of the GDPR on them, and b) made their lawyers think that it would be as well not to allow EU users anywhere within a mile of their service.
[Via The Overspill]