Moving From Pocket to Wallabag
On August 15th Pocket accounts needs to be moved over to Mozilla accounts, presumably this will help people. As part of this migration, Mozilla announced that they were deprecating service for certain readers. I use a Kobo Libra 2 which is on the deprecation list. Which compelled me to act and find an alternative. I landed on Wallabag and though it is self-hostable, I am using Wallabag.it for hosting.
Overall Experience
The switch from Pocket to Wallabag happened about two weeks ago now for me that I have been using it full time. Between the web and Android, the Wallabag is working flawlessly. Sometimes, my Wallabag host can be a little slow with response times, but it hasn't caused an issue.
My only complaint centers on Kobo usage. I'm finding the experience of syncing up which articles I have read between Kobo and the Wallabag server to be tiring. It should allegedly mark the things that are finished as finished on the server when I go to retrieve new articles, but it hasn't been doing that. I have spent some time tweaking the settings, but I did not use annotations when I was working with Pocket on the Kobo, but the KOReader keyboard is better, and so I started annotating articles as I read them. I have not found a way to sync these articles with annotations back to the server.
There are other read it later services and if you do not enjoy configuration or don't desire the option to self-host down the road, you might be better off using one of those. If you have similar cross-platform needs and integration with a Kobo device, I think Wallabag is the only game in town.
Importing Articles From Pocket
Wallabag has the ability to import your articles from Pocket. This doesn't happen instantaneously, though. All the articles go into a queue and my 1000 saved articles slowly appeared over a few days. The first day there weren't any articles imported. It's not entirely clear that this is what's happening, but reading online and waiting for it to happen confirmed this.
There doesn't appear to be a first party client for Android, so I'm using In the Poche. It's been great so far and while there appear to be fewer features than Pocket, I prefer the more minimal interface. For Firefox, I ended up using the Wallabagger extension. Wallabagger works in all the same ways that I used the Pocket extension.
Adding KOReader
Initially, I was just going to add Wallabag via NickelMenu and then realized that both Wallabag and the ability to configure external file syncing services exist natively with KOReader
www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...
Adding Wallabag to KOReader.
KOReader is a little more feature rich than I desire and the stock Kobo experience isn't bad. I went ahead and set up the KOReader integration of Wallabag
Life will be easier if you set up Wallabag when it's connected to your computer. You have to navigate the Kobo's flatfiles and find the wallabag.lua file and add your secret key, client ID. This is preferable to typing it in manually, which I tried first.
Wallabag inside KOReader
By default, it downloads the oldest articles first which isn't how Pocket works. I could see why one would want to read older articles first, or at least be presented with them.
Wallabag converts the articles to an epub and so the formatting is a little bit different than Pocket on Kobo. I didn't notice any real differences when reading on my phone.
Another issue with conversion is that photos and pull quotes end up formatting weirdly. I do not know if anything can fix this, but it's an issue I ran into with the first article I read through Wallabag on the Kobo.
UI
There's something to be desired with the KOReader UI. It's navigable but it could definitely be improved.
Issues While Setting This Up
The day I initially tried to get Wallabag on the Kobo, I was met with a series of 502 Bad Gateway errors. This was a temporary error, and it was resolved by the morning. It didn't impact my Android app experience. Articles that had been synced previously were still there for reading, I just couldn't fetch anything that I'd added from the web browser.
Risks to the device
Because of where this is stored on the device, it is low risk to modify the files.