When I use a tool like this one of the most important things is that it works offline so I can read something in a plane or on the go.

I've looked into most of these (and instapaper, pocket, etc) and ultimately found Wallabag to be the best. However, their app is quite buggy and site is fairly clunky for my taste. Luckily there's a pretty recent 3rd party client that works offline super well and is on Mac/Linux/android/iOS for free (yay flutter) https://github.com/casimir/frigoligo

Also, I'll note that it's basically a must to use the browser extension with the option to download via what the browser sees if you get content from a lot of sites. That being said the devs are super responsive to reports that sites aren't being scraped appropriately.

My biggest wish is that they supported YouTube (at least titles) and they had a way to indicate when a article needs to be scraped client side.

Now that I think about it, maybe I can write a little side script to fetch the YouTube titles and update it.

Oh good point it does work with the browser extension. I was experiencing this when trying to add them from my phone.

Why is Wallabag better than pocket?

Imo it's only better if you expect stuff to be saved correctly for reading offline. Pocket often fails even with major news sites and just opens the link to the browser. That's a big pain for me.

Also, I don't love the ads and recommended content in Pocket.

I've had wallabag on my radar for quite a while, but I keep ending up on "... but what even is it?".

Obviously it archives things for later reading. It works great for that on my e-reader, and I'm super glad it exists and KOReader supports it.

But the API[1] is largely undocumented and undescribed, so I'm kinda at a loss as to what the goals and possibilities are, because the app leaves quite a lot to be desired for e.g. replacing personal cataloguing on something Delicious-like. It seems tailor made for small, barely-customizable offline reading (save it for reading later, maybe with tags, then archive it and don't look at it again), despite the API apparently (maybe?) offering a lot more (but not describing it so it's hard to know how it's intended to be used).

Is there, like... documentation somewhere? Particularly with capabilities / intent / goals? I'm hesitant to sink much time into it without some idea of how it thinks of itself, building a bowl of Hyrum-slaw on top of a shaky foundation is no fun for anyone involved. If it's mostly just what the core app presents, it's probably not what I want.

[1]: https://app.wallabag.it/api/doc/ and https://doc.wallabag.org/developer/api/methods/

On a plane?, do you self-host in your laptop? Or is the client having a full copy of everything, incl. images?

I don't self-host on a laptop but the client does save a lot offline including images. I assume it's just the "unread" content but I haven't actually looked into that.

One thing that I've been looking for in these, and I seem to recall few have this:

Public mode? I'd like people to NOT have to log in.

Kind of a shot in the dark, but would you (or anyone else here) remember the name/website of a similar subscription app that was modern/minimal in appearance, and iirc was developed by Chinese devs? I remember seeing it I think on HN itself, likely as a comment somewhere. (I think folks were concerned about the data storage/privacy aspect, but iirc the service was very well designed/comprehensive).

You might be thinking of https://raindrop.io which is developed by a Kazakh developer?

Thanks a lot but I don’t think it’s that, I’ve been aware of raindrop for quite some time (even before I knew of this one I think) and this app only had a paid tier, no free/selfhosted options (which is why I didn’t bother making an account.)

(Just thinking out loud.. if I were to find all HN threads discussing such apps (maybe searching for raindrop or pocket?) via the search I might find it more quickly.)

Could it be Anybox? Never used it myself but seems like a possible candidate.

https://anybox.app/

It does not have self-hosted, although it does have a free tier. The free tier is pretty limited, allowing just 50 bookmarks. So basically amounts to a free trial more than something you’d use for free for a long time, IMO.

The website is available in English and Chinese, so the developers might be from China.

Thanks a lot! There's a very reasonable chance is is anybox! (The app I was thinking about wasn't self hosted, sorry about the confusion.) I'll check archive.org to see what it looked like a few months/year ago. (The "clean" and simple name along with the landing page style is definitely similar.)

> The app I was thinking about wasn't self hosted, sorry about the confusion

My wording was a bit confusing in how I said it, but what I meant to say was that like the one you were thinking of this one is also not self-hosted.