I switched to Pinboard few months ago when Delicious committed seppuku and made their site completely unusable. First, Delicious just shut down their site for something like a week, then they resurrected some ancient version of their site that looks & behaves like it's from 2007. Then they switched to an old domain (del.icio.us) and broke every bookmarklet and plugin that used their API. (I'm guessing they're planning on selling delicious.com domain name, which is worth a lot of money, so they made the switch.)<p>But the worst part is that you can't even save a link with all these changes they’ve made! I was getting errors 90% of the time (maybe even 98% but who's counting) so it was pointless to even try to save (I gave up after 4 days).<p>Whoever's managing Delicious is probably the most incompetent person in tech. Their communication with usersbase has been atrocious. They made only one or two blogposts and remained completely silent on social media (Twitter) during all these disastrous changes. People were unable to get their links and the company remained mum. Number of "F Delicious" posts on Twitter was very high few months back. Their site still doesn't work and you can't save links (just tried).<p>Anyway, I found Pinboard and have been happy since. RIP Delicious.
I have been using Pinboard for some years now. Great, rock solid service.
I currently keep ~2K bookmarks on Pinboard (<a href="http://pinboard.in/u:koevet" rel="nofollow">http://pinboard.in/u:koevet</a>) but I wonder if my usage pattern makes actual sense for me to keep on using it.<p>I mainly use Pinboard as a kitchen sink for articles and completely random stuff I stumble across. You can actually tell from my totally schizophrenic tag cloud.
At some point I was using a custom made script that bookmarks Hacker News story I'd +. So now I have hundreds of "hackernews" tagged bookmarks which I NEVER access.<p>I rarely go to Pinboard to retrieve a bookmark, maybe 10 times a year. It's faster to Google and for the stuff I really need to go back to I have local bookmarks.<p>I'm also a heavy RSS consumer: for sites for which I like to be updated of new content, I use my self-hosted RSS reader, no need to use bookmarks.<p>I guess I will keep on storing away links, the service is cheap anyway.
A quick reminder for those of you who read a lot of papers: if you have an archival account, Pinboard will index PDFs. This is way more useful than it sounds: as you bookmark papers, Pinboard gradually transforms into a mini search engine for the research you care about.<p>Someone asked me yesterday how it was I read so many crypto papers, after citing Bos and Costello in crypto dork Slack. I forgot to tell them my trick: I don't! I just follow citations and bookmark the hell out of things.
Pinboard is a great service. I like the paid, ad-free model with a nice open API. I haven't had my Pinboard for long, but already think I'm going to keep it going for a long time. It's one of the few cloud services I don't fear being locked into as I can just pull all my data whenever.<p>Self-hosted alternatives usually require some kind of interactive website front-end being set up or have some jenky browser extension support. Pinboard has pretty solid browser support so I can add to it wherever I am.<p>I use hugo to generate a links page from pinboard's RSS on my website. Every time I build the site, it pulls the RSS feed and formats it all pretty like. It's not extremely interesting or anything, but here it is in case you're curious[0]. Pinboard user pages aren't all that pretty, but it's really just a container for your data.<p>[0] [link redacted]
Self hosting alternatives:<p><a href="https://github.com/bookieio/Bookie" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bookieio/Bookie</a><p><a href="https://github.com/plainmade/unmark" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/plainmade/unmark</a><p>Especially Bookie looks good and would be a preferred candidate to transition to if you are still using the very old 'Sitebar', 'Scuttle' or the interesting 'Semantic Scuttle'.
I am a very happy user of Pinboard. And thanks for posting stats! One things which looks worrying is the stagnation of the number of users. By a common social media wisdom, it's a very bad sign... but some time ago I did analyze MathOverflow community (a research-level mathematics Stack Overflow) and they saturated in the first months (sic!) <a href="http://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2182/is-mathoverflow-saturated" rel="nofollow">http://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2182/is-mathoverflow-...</a>, yet it is a vibrant community.<p>Also, idlewords, as you are here: any plan to make search listing more items (50? 100?). It's a function I use a lot and sometimes this pagination makes it slower to find an old link.
I subscribed to Pinboard recently, when I lost any unreasonable hope I still had for delicious.<p>I knew 100% this was a low maintainance business, but I admit reading "the first wave of subscription renewals came due" and "I did almost nothing on the site this year except keep it running" almost in the same phrase hit me like a punch in the stomach; envy for his business acumen/talent I suppose :)
Pinboard user since 2012 here, after importing about 12k bookmarks from Delicious (17k now). It's the best kind of low tech service: It's all about bookmarking, not ads or gimmicks. The UI loading time seems O(1) rather than Delicious' O(n).<p>The only problem now is that there doesn't seem to be a working add-on for Firefox on Android. Does anyone know of one?
OT, but as an iOS user, I found my Pinboard usage went way up after buying the 4.99 Pinner app...I've always had a bit of trouble with bookmarklets...being able to add things via iOS actions ended up being a huge convenience for me but YMMV. <a href="http://pinnerapp.net/" rel="nofollow">http://pinnerapp.net/</a><p>Main complaint is that it's not from Maciej but the author seems committed to keeping it stable with improvements.
I signed up back in the $9 days, and currently have ~7k bookmarks on onboard (flawless import of my delicious data, too).<p>It's one of my everyday tools, and would pay a monthly fee if it ever gets to that.<p>A perfect example of "do one thing, and do it well".
Perhaps more relevant to me than the product itself, is the business model, the concept of running your own show, optimizing processes to maximize income and minimizing time spent working.
I switched to pinboard back when it was a one-time sign-up fee of 9$. I believe the fee increased for each new sign-up by 1 cent or so.<p>Del.icio.us was very good, but at some point it went to shit.
Maybe it was when it was acquired by Yahoo?
I remember trying to contact support about the broken Firefox plugin. They didn't fix it for over 6months.
As a member since July 14, 2009, I have nothing but praise for Pinboard. It does exactly what I'd like it to do and gets out of my way doing it. I've received tremendous value for money for my tiny fee.
Is there an opensource pinboard alternative? I am kind of surprised with all this love on HN give it's love for opensource... (maybe because he is a popular and funny commenter).
congrats on year 7!<p>I signed up years ago when delicious decided to completely redesign their service for no apparent reason and broke backwards compatibility with all plugins and made the main site less usable.<p>I am very happy that none of that asshattery is happening at pinboard and the site remains the boring plain ugly link collector that it is.<p>I do find myself using pocket more and more however and would be curious if Maciej has any thoughts on that service. seems like so far the've done everything right. Although they are aggressive with new features which to me is a little worrisome because sooner or later some executive will try to be brave and fuck it up with useless redesign.
As a long term Pinboard customer I dislike this "I am doing nothing and I am proud of it" mentality and I will unsubscribe.<p>Pinboard has been the same for years and I feel little attachment to the product.<p>I am unsure what to switch to, but Pinterest looks like an interesing and innovative solution.
I haven't hosted/run a site like this before. So I'm curious whether 17K a year to run a product like this is normal. If the author is willing to divulge the details, would love to know what takes the major chunk of that 17K.
I code same kind of php for myself and my brother to use in 2007 but never got to publish it for anybody else to use. Still use it, but not so frequent anymore. These days it's not so useful anymore, you can privately share and store links with so many alternatives like trello.com with mobile also.<p>But you should really make a video how it works and what are the benefits, that would make it easier to really understand.