Yes, I’m a big fan and very happy with Omnivore as a Pocket replacement. I also built a little browser extension to mimic the practical popup of “In My Pocket”, but based on Omnivore, since I was missing that particular functionality. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/omnivore-list-popup/
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Really cool, would you ever consider contributing to their extension and adding that feature to theirs?
Good question! I suppose the two extensions have very different main ideas/approaches, so maybe merging them isn’t so ideal or feasible. And to be honest, I also enjoy the freedom of having my own project!
The only thing this project needs is good self-hosting support. It's currently an absolute nightmare. Have tried it 2-3 times with absolutely no luck.
Issues for this have been open for over 3 years and there's been absolutely no progress.
I've been using wallabag for that, but this looks much more polished at first glance. I hope they improve their self-hosting support
Me too, but this looks like a good replacement. The docker setup of wallabag also was a bit of a pain for me, but this looks pretty straightforward and doesn't need redis, S3 API and a bunch of other plumbing. Will give it a try later.
I've been paying for wallabag for years but am slowly getting frustrated with the lack of updates to the UI. The Android app hasn't been updated in ages, and the web UI is clunky and misses features. You can't even change the font, for example. Omnivore wins there on all counts.
OTOH, Omnivore can't properly handle multi-page articles.
I used and paid for wallabag, but it lacks so many basic features it was a pain to use. Just trying to tag articles was a chore, since wallabag doesn't suggest existing tags.
Looks like a cool app but it's super unpractical and hacky to self host and you can't even use a bunch of features when it's deployed that way.
Can you elaborate on your experiences so far? What's required in order to selfhost it, and what features will be missing...?
From their blog post (linked to by the docs page) about self-hosting:
The following Omnivore features will not be included in this minimal Omnivore setup:
- The web app (we will use the iOS app from the AppStore as our client)
- Search of PDFs
- Saving URLs instead of pages (more on this below)
-Receiving newsletters via email
- Text to speech
Not only that, they use a non-self hosted elasticsearch provider.
Their example docker-compose file in the repo has no less than four containers defined, not including the database server, and you have to build them all yourself, so it's more of a local dev environment type deployment rather than production.
Here's their "make self-hosting more practical" Github issue, coming on two years old with no progress: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/25
All of that was more than enough for me to not even bother to try to deploy my own instance. I manage with Wallabag for now, it's not the greatest implementation either but at least it can be self-hosted. Omnivore looks slick but the backend just doesn't keep up.
Thanks for this. I think this is also an example of a opensource software that is selfhostable, but is intended for a different audience. I think Zammad, Monicahq etc fall under this category. I suppose one would need a solution with an entirely different architecture that's aimed for selfhosters, rather than hope that omnivore becomes easier to selfhost.
https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/pull/2966
Here seems to be a recent PR of someone trying to help out with this, maybe you can give a hand? Seems you understand a bit about the topic.
As far as I can tell this just fixes some relatively minor issues the contributor was experiencing deploying the hacky self-host stack on his Kubernetes home lab or private server. It doesn't bring anything new to the table, and I'm not sure that a full on Kubernetes or similar distributed swarm deployment is really what the average self-hoster needs or even wants.
It could just be that Omnivore tries to do too much for it to be feasible to self host. It was also conceptualized with certain third-party backend services in mind which makes it tricky to adapt.
Maybe I'm asking for too much, but I would be looking for a two service stack, one for the app and one database service. The current and forseeable future state of Omnivore is four backend services excluding the database, and like I already pointed out you're not even getting the full feature set.
Really good app. Hopefully when they introduce their premium pricing it doesn’t start to enshittify. I’m hoping it’s not another case of taking advantage of the open source community
Well, suppossedly what they would offer doesn't seem to change things much:
Future Pricing Plans
We have a few product ideas we have experimented with that would be paid add-ons to the current service: collaborative tools, AI integration, translation tools, and premium text to speech voices. Of these features, the premium text to speech voices are the only one that are currently available in the app, as part of our "ultra realistic voices" beta.
Oof, what a bad name
I imagine "it eats everything"? But its a bit weird and maybe politically influenced a bit
How does politics tie in?
This is what pocket would like to be when it grows up.
Not for me as its not vegan /s
Linkwarden then
I use this on edge and I was going to switch to Firefox but the extension has been removed from the store.
It seems there was an issue with some of the things needed for the extension to be on the store, they already sent the fix to Mozilla and are waiting for them to response, this happened on Friday so most likely they will reply this week.
Thanks for the update!
Wow. I've been self hosting wallabag for articles and Nextcloud News for RSS. But I see Omnivore does both in one app and looks more polished! I'm going to try it.
The link sending is a bit convoluted, but once you figure it out it is a beautiful app.
That's what I want.