Bart Busschots joins me to talk about his trials and tribulations finding a good bookmark manager to replace Pocket, which he never really liked in the first place. He tells us everything he loves about Raindrop.io. Unlike most Chit Chat Across the Pond episodes, there’s a full blog post below if you’d rather read than listen … or do both!
Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_06_14
Blog Post By Bart
Bookmark managers are probably quite like RSS readers these days — most people have no use for them, but those that do really rely on them! I definitely fall into the latter category (for both RSS readers and bookmark managers), and not just because I write two regular news-based podcasts!
I’ve been falling ever more in love with the cross-platform Raindrop.io bookmark manager for a year now, and it’s been on the list of things Allison would describe as blowing my dress up for some months, but there was never an opportune moment to dedicate one of our scheduled conversational podcasts to it. Well, thanks to Mozilla putting the final nail in Pocket’s proverbial coffin, now is the perfect time! Mozilla officially announced the end of Pocket earlier this summer, so there are lots of former Pocket users hunting around for a replacement at the moment!
The Problem to be Solved
Everyone who uses a bookmark manager has their own problems to solve, but for me, I need to track links for four distinct reasons. Because I’m solving four different problems, the ability to organise my saved links is particularly important to me.
Here are the four problems I use a bookmark manager to solve:
- To gather possible stories for both the Security Bits segments here on the NosillaCast, and episodes of my own Let’s Talk Apple show.
- To store articles of longer-term interest for a number of possible reasons:
- Good advice articles for friends and family
- Good tutorials for technologies I use or am thinking of using
- Reference articles for work-related things
- To collect recipe ideas that I might want to cook some time in the future
- To collect possible gift ideas as I see them, instead of frantically looking when birthdays or holidays start getting close!
I come across links all over the place, not just on the web, so I want more than a browser plugin for saving links. Allison often sends me show ideas via Telegram, the NosillaCastaways often send me things in the Podfeet Slack or on social media, and I use an RSS reader to gather news for Security Bits and LTA. So, in effect, the place I come across links the least often is actually my browser! That probably makes me a little unusual, but it means a share-sheet is a much better fit for me than a browser plugin.
I really want my saved bookmarks in an app, because I like being able to switch to my bookmark collection as a distinct thing with its own name and icon, both on my Macs and on my mobile devices. I’m not sure how unusual that makes me, but for me native macOS, iOS, and iPadOS apps are a must-have.
Finally, I find a notes field fantastically useful for adding extra context around why, exactly, I’m saving a link. I really like being able to shout out specific NosillaCastaways when they send me something good, and it can be really useful to remember why exactly, I thought a particular story was news-worthy or notable, etc..
My Back-story
I had been a paying Pocket users for many years, but I was never really happy with the service. It worked, but it was lacking in features, and the UIs on the various apps and share sheets were ugly verging on user-hostile. They were definitely not elegant or user-friendly! But hey, it got the job done, and I was supporting Mozilla, who I want to see thrive!
For a while Pocket was actually slowly maturing and evolving, and I was hopeful that the app would mature into something I actually liked rather than just tolerating.
But alas that’s not how things unfolded. First, the improvements stalled. That had me a little un-easy, but then things got worse, and the quality started back-sliding. The native Mac app was discontinued, and Mozilla’s suggestions for Mac users were insulting and infuriating — surely Mac users could just use the web? Or if they had an M-series Mac, the iOS app? Frankly, that experience sucked!
So, I started my first hunt for an alternative. Long story short, I found nothing that really excited me, so I begrudgingly soldiered on with Pocket, having given Pocket some frank and honest feedback about just how unhappy I was, and just how let down I felt as a long-standing paying customer. Their platitudes in reply didn’t inspire much home, but like I say, I grumbled a little and just soldiered on.
But the back-sliding didn’t stop. Despite supposedly discontinuing the Mac app to allow their developers focus their attention on improving the remaining apps, that’s not what happened. Not only did the iOS app not improve, it got worse! The bugs were taking longer and longer to fix, and finally, there was a bug so catastrophic that I’d finally had enough! The sync engine completely messed up and I lost two full weeks worth of stories, which meant trawling back through my RSS reader to re-discover the stories for an entire Security Bits and half a Let’s Talk Apple!
Back on the hunt again I still didn’t find anything that I really liked, but I settled on what appeared to be a new up-and-coming service named Omnivore. Their website was very frank about the fact that their then current feature-set was limited, but they promised they had great things in the works, and their roadmap seemed to align very well with my needs and desires. Finally, a look at their release history showed they were indeed innovating quickly, and new features were rolling out at a nice rate.
Even at that point their nascent service had all the features I needed, even if it was missing a lot of fit and finish. They even had an importer for Pocket users, so that was enough to push me over the edge. I cancelled my Pocket Subscription, synced across my existing bookmarks, and started using Omnivore on my iPhone, iPac, and Macs.
Initially things were going well. Sure, it was sometimes a little buggy, and there was one week where all the tags I added on iOS failed to sync to the cloud, so they were missing on my Mac, but sorting through a week’s worth of un-tagged links is only mildly annoying compared to having to start from scratch because they were completely lost! And, the bug was quickly fixed and it never happened again.
The new features continued to come, and I was starting to think I really had made the right choice, that all the turmoil was worth it, but then, the warning signs started again!
First, the new features seemed to stop coming. And while the bugs did keep getting fixed, they didn’t seem to be getting fixed as quickly anymore. Uh-oh!
And then, one day, they posted a blog post that basically said “so long and thanks for all the Fish!” (Douglas Adams reference 🙂). They’d just been bought, the product was being discontinued, and users had just a few weeks to export their bookmarks and find something new. Oh, and those exports, they were not in OPML or something standard, but in JSON format (there may also have been an option to dump them in one giant big HTML page).
Not AGAIN!!! — another hunt for a new bookmark manager 😠
I feared my only reliable choice would be to take responsibility for this problem myself and self-host an instance of the open-source Wallabag on a server of my own.
But, as I was procrastinating about how best to deploy Wallabag, I decided to try one more time to find something better. I can’t remember how I finally found Raindrop.io, I may have begged for help on social media, but much to my surprise, I finally found what looked like a great option, and it wasn’t new, it had been around for ages. No idea how I had missed it before, but I had!
The only minor wrinkle was that it didn’t seem like there was an easy route to getting my weird JSON export from Omnivore into Raindrop.io, but in the end I decided it was probably a good time to start over anyway. I saved the weird JSON export to my OneDrive so I still technically have the links should I ever really need something, and since it’s in JSON format it is actually searchable with jq, so I didn’t feel I was totally throwing away my archive.
TL;DR — best decision I’ve made in years, a clean slate in a new app was just what the doctor ordered 😀
How Raindrop.io Works
Firstly, there are browser plugins for just about every browser, and native apps for every OS you’re likely to be using, even for Linux!
You can see the full list here — raindrop.io/download.
There’s also a nice web interface, and there’s even a web services API should I want to start automating things in the future!
The iOS share-sheet is also superb, best of any app bookmark manager I’ve tried, and there’s a notes field so I can easily annotate my bookmarks.
My biggest quibble is that there’s no macOS share sheet, but that’s the platform I save links from the least, and the button to add new links in the native Mac app behave so much like the share-sheet that it’s not proven to be as much of a problem as I’d initially feared.
When it comes to organising my Bookmarks, Raindrop.io is simply fantastic. Previously, I’d been forced to use either folder-like categories or tags, but with Raindrop.io, I get both.
In Pocket, a bookmark had a single category, so stories that were relevant to both Security Bits and Let’s Talk Apple were a problem. My workaround was to always carefully save such stories into the category for the show that was the nearest in the future, and then move them once I was done creating the notes for that show. This was cumbersome and inevitably, some stories got missed for one show or the other because I put them in the wrong category first, or forgot to move them.
Onivore on the other hand used tags, so I could easily tag a story as being for both Security Bits and Let’s Talk Apple, but this approach brought a different problem, stories tagged as Let’s Talk Apple would flood my search results when I was searching for recipe ideas for the glut of Apple’s that needed eating during the fall!
This is where Raindrop.io has completely revolutionised how I work. I get to have the best of both worlds!
Yes, Raindrop.io supports tags, but it also supports what it calls collections, which are basically folder-like categories. Each bookmark is stored in exactly one collection and can have as many tags as you like. Collections can be nested, which gives you levels of categorisation that can be useful. You can configure your searches to specific collections, and when you do that in a collection with sub-collections, your search covers the sub-collections too. You can also search by tag.
I’ve created collections for each of the problems I’m using Raindrop.io to solve for me, and I even have one level of nesting in one of my collections:
Now, I save all news stories in the Shownotes collection, and all recipes in the Cooking → Recipe to Try collection, and I can use the same tags for different things without ever messing up my search results!
When I search for the tag apple in my recipes collection, I only see recipes, and when I search for lta in my Shownotes collection, I only see Apple news. Perfect!
Finally, being able to add notes has meant I never again forget to credit a listener for sending me on a great tip 🙂
To give you an idea of how the app works for me, here are two very typical screenshots.
First, an example of me capturing a story recommended from a NosillaCastaway in the Podfeet Slack using the iOS share-sheet:
Notice I’ve chosen the Shownotes collection, tagged it as being for Security Bits (sb), and added a note crediting listener Lynn who flagged it for my attention in Slack.
Next, this screenshot shows what I see when I’m preparing to write the notes for the next Security Bits on my Mac:
To get this view, I simply opened the app, clicked on the Shownotes collection in the left side-bar, then I clicked on the sb tag on one of the stories to filter down to just Security Bits stories, and then I’m good to go!
I’m using the free version because I don’t need the Pro features, but I’m giving serious consideration to upgrading just because I want to give the developer some support. I’ll probably never use the pro features, but I really do want the app to hang about 🙂