Switch from Pocket to save and read web articles

By Nik Rawlinson

What you need: Instapaper or Matter account

Time required: 30 minutes

Over the past 18 years, Pocket (www.getpocket.com) has become one of the most convenient ways to keep track of what you’d like to read online. Owned by Firefox maker Mozilla, it not only lets you pin online articles to return to later, but also saves the article’s contents to your account. That means they’ll still be available when you have time to read them, even if the original piece disappears in the meantime.

Many of us at Computeractive team use it daily, and the list of articles we’d like to read ‘some day’ runs to hundreds of items. And that’s a problem. Why? Because in May, Mozilla gave users two months’ notice that it was closing the service. Many of us hoped it would be snapped up by someone else, but at the time of writing (mid June) that’s not yet happened. So, with so many unread articles that we don’t want to lose track of, we’ve been looking for alternatives.

After trying out several options, we’ve settled on two: Matter and Instapaper. Each offers a broadly equivalent service and, like Pocket, has a free tier that suits most of our needs.

Here, we’ll explain what’s happening to Pocket, how you can transfer your Pocket reading list and, if you’ve never used Pocket before, how Matter or Instapaper can help you keep track of what you want to read online. That way, the urge to sit back and read something right now won’t interrupt what you really should be doing.

As Mozilla explains in its guide to Pocket’s closure (www.snipca.com/55190), it stopped users saving new content on 8 July. All you can do now is export your saved data before 8 October. On that date, everything will be deleted, including your account. There’s no need to manually delete your account to protect your data.