This is an inherent value trap that’s really not sustainable for VC backed startups. Which will inevitably burn to the ground as the revenue dwindles. Pocket, Omnivore, Upnext, your next favorite server based read-later app. One of the reason I believe is the market is saturated with undifferentiated apps that’s all free.
While I think self-hosting is great, you probably want to solve mobile capturing and consumption, hosting a server, then paring a modern maintained mobile app that you can configure so it connects to your self-hosted server. Omnivore maybe your best shot? Although maybe vibe code may get you there sooner?
If you are on Apple ecosystem though, there is another self-sustainable way that doesn’t require you to host anything on your VPS, that works with mobile, which is iCloud/Cloudkit based apps.
There are at least a dozen options here. I made one of these:
- no account, no server, no tracking
- Liquid Glass Mac app that launch from menu bar.
- Separate iOS app purposefully designed for mobile
- Doesn’t use a browser extension, but monitors double copies from clipboard.
- Shows all the cards in a waterfall grid, so you don’t have to click into these cards to see what the link is about. Every website you use, from TikTok to GoodReads, will show up as well designed cards.
- Uses Apple Intelligence on device to auto-tag links.
- free to capture without limit, has a one time purchase option (that removes the sub nudge) as well as affordable subscription option with PPP in 10 territories (purchase power parity pricing).
I believe it’s the sweet spot in this category, and with the subscription revenue we have, it will never shutdown as long as Apple still offers iCloud, plus, you own the binary.
One way to reframe the question is to ask: why social media took over and what RSS can do to catch up?
I got a theory but curious about others thoughts.
My theory is barrier to entry, network density, lurker effect, UX, dopamine and attention economy loop, content recommendation etc all fell behind.
One hint is how TikTok’s old parent company started as a content aggregator and still runs one of the biggest one in china called Toutiao.
Also plug my tiny contribution to fix the inconsistent reading experience of rss ready blogs without installing an app: https://feedable.doublememory.com
Https://DoubleMemory.com: an Apple only (Mac and iOS) external memory and bookmarking app. Hoping to add auto tagging to it with apple’s foundation model framework.
Thinking about building an arena like product discovery platform to help people finding the perfect app for them… like a bookmarking app…
Just explored that setting, realized we do expose that setting, you can hide the dock icon. Once it's hidden, it won't preserve the title when closing the app.
The refocusing issue is now fixed in next build. I previously spent many hours trying to fix it but O3 just one shotted it.... :D Thanks so much for the suggestion!
I plan to add shortcuts support so hopefully that will allow people to integrate. And also as the foundation for the next-gen Siri and MCP support. But I’d love to hear your workflow to find out what you have in mind. Please email at [email protected] or find us on discord or social. Let’s jam!
I’m actually not a clipboard manager user before. That’s why I wanted to avoid saving everything into its history. I wanted everything in DoubleMemory to be deliberately curated. That’s also why I’m hesitate to support other feed like features like email subscriptions or RSS feeds.
But yes Maccy is great, DM’s first version looks very much like a list of snippets on menu bar and then a list of snippets with a preview on the side, eventually evolved to its current form.
Thanks for trying and finding a spot for it in your workflow!
Notion and Obsidian are great, I use them weekly too. But I don't think bookmarking should live in an text editor. It can still work, just like Apple Notes can also for people with limited needs, but it doesn't do: quick search/filter/ordering, rich previews (these cards are not DoubleMemory cards imo), immersive reader, archive/notes, keyboard navigation... Pocket also don't have these, so Notion/Obsidian may not be much a downgrade, if your needs are simple, it's totally respectable way to organize your content, especially if your workflow is already centered around these.
iOS doesn't have this clipboard magic of course, just relies on the regular share sheet. The most interesting part other than the waterfall layout is the swiping reader view, here is 30s video: https://x.com/randomor/status/1910111028865818664
Yes it's configurable, between 1-10s, defaulted to 5s.
well, it's not me choosing it, i'm just tapping into the system clipboard. If you right click and copy something twice it will also be auto saved. I do this instinctively previously so one day I thought can I actually use this as a signal to REALLY remember something...
good eye, i'll try play with that setting. Raycast does already have bookmarking features, but when if enough people make this request, i'll look into it. Or maybe expose some MCP interface so it can interact with this.
Many of us certainly do share these pain points, most people will lament of a closing read-it-later tool and think "if only it's open source" so they can self-host a tool that likes pocket or omnivore, thinking that's the final form of this category. Nothing wrong with that, that's a tried and proven paradigm and comes with no additional transition cost.
Because i started this not intending to build a read-it-later tool, we are working on different foundations with building blocks... we'll see where this digression will take me...
You got it. Yes, AI will be a good piece of the puzzle. Local models is exactly what I prefer, if you haven't notice, that's a big principle of this app. I'm really hoping Apple can step in and offer a local model so I don't have to download one big blob. Supporting Ollama sounds cool but I feel like that's a big barrier for many... BYOK also nice, but at that point why not just build a MCP interface instead of building another flavor of AI chat? Otherwise I'm thinking about embedding all items so it's easier to: auto-generate tags, cluster by topics etc...
Of course, I appreciate your perspective and am constantly collecting data points. I'll get to the pricing model experiments. Now that Apple is opening up third party payment, maybe I'll finally looking into third party subscription SDKs...
definitely want to get there soon, right now the most requested related features are apple shortcuts. Hopefully with the growing MCP ecosystem it will be a sweet MCP setup as we don't need a server or a node process.
While I think self-hosting is great, you probably want to solve mobile capturing and consumption, hosting a server, then paring a modern maintained mobile app that you can configure so it connects to your self-hosted server. Omnivore maybe your best shot? Although maybe vibe code may get you there sooner?
If you are on Apple ecosystem though, there is another self-sustainable way that doesn’t require you to host anything on your VPS, that works with mobile, which is iCloud/Cloudkit based apps.
There are at least a dozen options here. I made one of these:
- no account, no server, no tracking
- Liquid Glass Mac app that launch from menu bar.
- Separate iOS app purposefully designed for mobile
- Doesn’t use a browser extension, but monitors double copies from clipboard.
- Shows all the cards in a waterfall grid, so you don’t have to click into these cards to see what the link is about. Every website you use, from TikTok to GoodReads, will show up as well designed cards.
- Uses Apple Intelligence on device to auto-tag links.
- free to capture without limit, has a one time purchase option (that removes the sub nudge) as well as affordable subscription option with PPP in 10 territories (purchase power parity pricing).
I believe it’s the sweet spot in this category, and with the subscription revenue we have, it will never shutdown as long as Apple still offers iCloud, plus, you own the binary.
It’s at https://doublememory.com if this sounds interesting to you.