The End of Pinboard?
Over the past few years there have been a slowly increasing number of pinboard outages with less communication. While debugging the last outage I purged my local history from the 3rd party Pins iOS app and found that Pinboard was throttling their download API. I could download only 100 of my 50,000 or so pins. (It’s still easy to download the whole set as a file).
That’s ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of. His Pinboard.in support forum has been quiescent for years. I’ll be researching my micro blog options and I’ll write about what I come up with on tech.kateva.org.
10 years is an eternity on the web. Pinboard had a good run, but it too is passing.
I, too, have see the site become slower and less reliable. Unlike some others, I haven’t had trouble downloading my archive.
Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of “Don’t be a free user” is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it’s in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn’t sustain itself.
It’s a stark reminder that even paid models aren’t immune to market forces and operational challenges.
Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.
Previously:
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At one time he asked all existing subscribers for donations, by moving to an annual subscription, to enable him to pay a Romanian programmer to maintain the site. Then he used the money for something else other than employing somebody to maintain the site. Not cool.
Ref: https://x.com/gingerbeardman/status/1610076083013013506
The last time I saw something about the seeming imminent demise of Pinboard, I moved my archive over to Raindrop.io and have been quite happy there for the last year or 18 months.
To toot my own horn a little, I wrote a command-line app to back up your Pinboard notes into a SQLite database. (Note that it only handles notes, not your other bookmarks.) It backs up incrementally, so after the initial run it only needs to download the notes that have changed. It’s available through Homebrew, and it lives on GitHub: https://github.com/bdesham/pinboard-notes-backup
After seeing this make the rounds (on pinboard.in/popular, no less), I moved to Raindrop. I still have my Pinboard account and will be migrating some of the more-important archived items into something more durable like PDFs and/or single-file archives.
I would have done this sooner, but Raindrop only now has an easy way to get links into it from Safari that doesn't involve a "this extension can see everything you view on the Internet" permission. I use the Alfred workflow.
It’s odd the author wrote:
> Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of.
When there is active support happening on Xitter.
In the last six months, I've started slowly moving as much as I can to self-hosted or locally stored systems. It's pretty surprising how simple it is to self-host a lot of things like calendars or an RSS reader. There are plenty of self-hosted systems like pinboard that you can set up in half an hour, for very little money.
I think that's a better idea than moving to the next system that depends on a single person keeping it up, and providing you access to your data.
Half a year ago I thought about subscribing to Pinboard. I decided to host Linkding myself instead, which is very similar. I think I have done the right thing. https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
Like others commenting here and elsewhere, I was a Pinboard user with a paid archive account for a very long time, and have since switched to Raindrop. (Raindrop works for me but I’d caution people against switching to any other service without due diligence.)
It seems that Maciej lost interest in Pinboard several years ago to go gallivanting around the world (Hong Kong, anyone?). Which, fine, good for him!
What frustrated me is his reluctance to be clear about the state and future of the service. In a way there was more clarity about Pinboard when he was saying nothing about it, as opposed to the current situation of the occasional Twitter reply.
