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GadgeteerZA @beehaw.org

Omnivore is an excellent open-source read-it-later alternative to Pocket, that can be self-hosted as well

I use read-it-later services extensively to save any news I want to do blog posts about later, or something I want to look at in more detail when I have time (and three monitors).

I had been self-hosting Wallbag for quite a while, and did a video about it too, but I had some issues re-installing it when I moved to Docker container hosting on my VPS.

Ominvore certainly looks very interesting, with a modern interface and quite a few useful features. I'm starting so long with their free cloud hosted service, and could register with ease, and even initiate an import from Pocket. They do have a docker-compose file for setting up containerised self-hosting, but I'm going to wait a bit just to see if that matures a bit, as it seems it is early days still and no proper guide has been completed yet for it.

Apart from the usual saving links for reading later, with tags, archiving, etc, it also supports a clutter-free reader view for easy reading without adverts. In the reading view you can also change formatting, highlight text, add/view notes (in a Notebook view), and track reading progress across all devices (each note also shows a yellow progress line on its tile view to indicate reading progress).

It also has a feature for subscriptions via e-mail. Omnivore can generate unique e-mail addresses you can use for subscribing to online newsletters, and it is intelligent enough to realise that if a mail contains a welcome message, note from the author, etc that will be forwarded by Omnivore to your main e-mail address (without exposing that to the newsletter service).

It also has integration with Logseq, Obsidian notes, webhooks, and more.

You can save links by adding them in the app, using a browser extension, or by using the share option on mobile devices and just selecting to share to the Omnivore app.

There is no price model yet set up for the service, but I'm pretty sure they'll have an ongoing useful free tier with their online service, and probably only charge for some more advanced functionality. There is always the self-hosted option too. But for now, this looks very functional and useful to me, and I've started using it.

See https://omnivore.app/

22 comments

  • I’ve been using a personal discord server to *save all the things I want to read, watch, or look at later

    Edit: no idea how Dave found his way into this comment

    • Discord is not FOSS and is a privacy nightmare.

    • So with sub-channels and then dragging and dropping between them? I suppose existing Discord users may try that. I'd be interested to hear if many others are using Discord in that way.

      • I have a personal Discord server that I drop links into - fully intending to get them out of Discord and into my notes someday, though let’s just say I’m quite behind on that.

        Mostly I find it useful because I can drop a link on from my phone and quickly access it from my PC, or vice versa. There is some organization into channel types (food, music, games, etc) but these days I just use a general channel as a dumping ground and figure I’ll sort later, ha.

  • I like omnivore a bunch. That said, I'm back on Wallabag simply for the great integration with my RSS reader of choice: Miniflux. Once you've set up the api "handshake" its just a click of the save button in Miniflux then it schwoops over to Wallabag. So great.

    I have a docker compose for Wallabag that works perfectly every time I can post if it helps. Once I sanitize the juicy IPs and domain name, that is. And when I say it works everything, realize that I've done it like 8 times because when I'd pooch my VPS OS, I'd nuke it and start over.

    EDIT: Here's the docker-compose I use and it works repeatedly. Which, shit, I'm not ashamed because I'm still learning. But took me a long time to hunt down one that was easy to copy/paste into the .yml and docker-compose up and there ya go. NOTE: One thing that stumped me for a long time was the jacked up launch page after install. If it looks like broken HTML its because you put either an IP or a bad/fake domain name in the compose file. So make sure you have a domain name for it. Also, Wallabag is pretty cheap to have them host. I think its like $17/yr. But for now I'm selfhosting it on a cheap VPS. 

     undefined
        
version: '3'
services:
  wallabag:
    image: wallabag/wallabag
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=wallaroot
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_DRIVER=pdo_mysql
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_HOST=db
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PORT=3306
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_NAME=wallabag
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_USER=wallabag
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_PASSWORD=wallapass
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_CHARSET=utf8mb4
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX="wallabag_"
      - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_HOST=127.0.0.1
      - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_USER=~
      - SYMFONY__ENV__MAILER_PASSWORD=~
      - SYMFONY__ENV__FROM_EMAIL=wallabag@example.com
      - SYMFONY__ENV__DOMAIN_NAME=https://your.domain.tld
      - SYMFONY__ENV__SERVER_NAME="Cool Name here"
    ports:
      - "8585:80"
    volumes:
      - /opt/wallabag/images:/var/www/wallabag/web/assets/images
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "wget" ,"--no-verbose", "--tries=1", "--spider", "http://localhost"]
      interval: 1m
      timeout: 3s
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
  db:
    image: mariadb
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=wallaroot
    volumes:
      - /opt/wallabag/data:/var/lib/mysql
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "mysqladmin" ,"ping", "-h", "localhost"]
      interval: 20s
      timeout: 3s
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "redis-cli", "ping"]
      interval: 20s
      timeout: 3s

    • Thanks very much for that docker file. Yes I tried it about 2 years back, and I think Docker was not really an option then (or an easy one). I know what you mean by the RSS reader integration as I was using that with Wallabag. I'll need to have a good look at the two again I think. Omnivore is still very new so not much 3rd party support, although they have an API and some webhook integration.

      • I think it is the best FOSS option out there, but the integration won me over. If that ever changes I'll switch back immediately.

  • Do they have offline support on desktop? I would expect it to be a key functionality of any read it later app, and yet can't find any that that does.

    • I put my Android phone on plane mode, shut the app and reopened it, and yes I could read the full content when opening each article.

      • Thanks, but I was asking specifically for desktop. Most apps do have offline support for mobile, but never desktop for some reason

  • Have an upvote from me. I dumped pocket and started using this instead. It's simpler, cleaner and easier to use. I also reported a web page that wouldn't save properly, it was just an URL without any header or text.

    Within about 48 hours, after reporting the link, it saved as a proper page of text. I like to think they fixed it.

    • That's good to hear as I had about 40 links that related to two sites, one has a cloudflare authentication, and the other a verification for out of country access (I think). Hoping they can be fixed. I can understand that is problematic to have an automated text retriever passing tests like that.

  • there is such a thing bookmarks, check it out in your spare time

    • My bookmarks only save a title and link - no tags to group, no full text content, no unread indication. So, how would one use bookmarks in a meaningful way? I could use a piece of paper too, but it's not the best way for me.

22 comments