I have another theory, actually.

I'm also a very old user, since the first days of the service, and I don't know how many saves I have it inside (will see when my export arrives).

The latest iteration's search was abysmal, and I normally refrain from using strong words. It failed to find exact matches from titles, the words or excerpts I know that exist in the article I'm searching for, and as a result, it became a FIFO basically. Unless you consume the list directly, hitting something you are looking for was nigh impossible.

After being berated by support to use the search "properly", I started to build my own app, a TUI tool to curate the list, but it was going slow. Honestly, I'm a bit relieved now since I'm free from developing that software, and I can dig the data in my own terms.

BTW, my export is just arrived, and it's a series of CSV files which has the usual suspects as columns. I can import this into a SQLite and dive the way I want.

One less thing to worry about, but this doesn't mean I'm not bitter about its demise, too.

Edit: It turns out I have ~37K saves. Whoa.

Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared).

Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.

Agree on search being abysmal - I'm surprised that none of these readings apps realized that the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet.

perch.app is the newest entrant to this space, and it's the closest I've seen to getting this right.

What's your other theory? ;-)

I used to use Rain.drop, not the same a pocket, but similar. I imported the data into Obsidian and I now use that for information I want to save online using the clipper plugin. It's changed my life. If you like customizing the searchability and displaying content from saved pages, is the best IMHO.

I’m curious: with that many saves, what were you main reasons for using Pocket? Did you glean info at scale or is it just the case that you saved so much, read some subset, and it grew over time?

What was the theory!!! I had to read your comment twice looking for it, only to realize that there was no theory in there!