The Best Free Pocket Alternative: Obsidian

It was recently announced that Pocket is shutting down. It’s a shame. Pocket was a great product that has been around for a long time. It served a real purpose, giving us a tool for temporarily storing articles that we want to read or reference later. I started using Pocket around ten years ago. Somewhere along the way I stopped using it because, like so many other apps I tried, it fell into disrepair. The problem with read-it-later apps is that they make it really easy to add endless amounts of content and never go back to process it. If you’re like me, your Pocket was full of articles that you wanted to read but never actually will. And that isn’t the only problem, as we can see now. Pocket was also a service, and …

1 Why You Should Use Obsidian as Your Read-it-Later App
2 First of All: Set up Obsidian as Your Read it Later App
3 Improving the Ergonomics of Read it Later in Obsidian
3.1 Solution 1: Use Folders
3.2 Solution 2: Use Properties
3.3 Solution 3: Dataview
4 Importing Pocket Data
5 Conclusion

Why You Should Use Obsidian as Your Read-it-Later App

Obsidian has many advantages compared to a traditional read-it-later app.

Most importantly: you own your own data. Even if Obsidian were to shut down, all of your data would still be accessible via any other text editor.
Obsidian is flexible. You can use it just as a read-it-later app, or you can add additional systems to support that system.
Obsidian is versatile. You can really fine-tune your system to fit your needs, rather than using a system designed by someone else. Sound interesting? Let’s jump into how to accomplish all of that.

First of All: Set up Obsidian as Your Read it Later App

Using Obsidian as a read-it-later app is easier than you think. How do you do it? If you’re new to Obsidian, you first need to download two tools:

Download Obsidian
Download the Obsidian Web Clipper See my articles on Getting Started with Obsidian and the Obsidian Web Clipper for a crash course in the basics. OR, if you want to just get started: Open Obsidian, create a vault, and use the Web Clipper in your browser to add articles to your vault. That’s really all it takes: you now have a permanent archive of all your Read It Later articles. An archive that no one can take from you. What if Obsidian shuts down? Fortunately for you my friend, it doesn’t matter: Obsidian makes it easier to view Markdown files, but behind the scenes all of your files are just Markdown. You can use any other Markdown viewer or text editor, and it will work just as well as Obsidian.

Improving the Ergonomics of Read it Later in Obsidian

Now that you have an Obsidian vault and are importing articles, let’s talk about ergonomics. One of the reasons you like Pocket so much is that it had good ergonomics. The best features of Pocket, in my opinion, are these:

The ability to save articles and find them later
The ability to archive articles that have already been read
The ability to “star” articles for later analysis In our Read It Later vault we already have #1: the ability to save articles to read later (that was easy!) But as you add more and more articles, you will inevitably lose track of which articles you have and have not read. So how can we keep track of that?

Solution 1: Use Folders

The simplest way to solve this problem? Use folders. In our vault we can create “Read” and “Unread” folders, and set up the Clipper to automatically add new articles to the “Unread” folder. Then once you’ve read the article, move it to the “Read” folder. This solution works great and is super simple. If you only use Obsidian as a read-it-later app, then this is probably the solution for you. However, if you decide to use Obsidian for more than that, you might want to graduate to the next solution.

Solution 2: Use Properties

Obsidian Notes all have properties, which are kind of like notes for your notes. Inside properties you can save all kinds of data which can help you categorize, organize, and sort your notes. If you’re new to properties, see An Introduction to Obsidian Properties for more info. Properties are valuable because they are easy to add and update. Moving a note from one folder to another is a bit cumbersome, properties are a much easier way to designate a certain status for a note. So let’s add a property called “read” to our notes. By default properties appear at the top of every note in Obsidian. Click “Add property” and name your new property “read”. Then click on the icon to the left of the new property, and change the “property type” to “checkbox”: A screenshot of the context menu that allows you to change property types in Obsidian. With that, we now have a way of tracking whether we have read an article or not. Next we need to add this to the Web Clipper. Look at these instructions in order to update the template in Web Clipper. We want to do the same thing here: edit the properties to add a “read” property, change it to a checkbox, and make sure the box is unchecked. Once you’ve done that, your web clipper settings should look something like this: A screenshot of my Obsidian Clipper settings. Notice all that other metadata? Much of it is built-in to the web clipper. It’s optional, but I suggest you leave it as the default. It doesn’t hurt anything, and you might just want it in the future. Once our properties are set up, we should create a view. There are a handful of ways to do this, but likely the easiest would be to use an embedded search. Using this code, Obsidian will automatically compile a list of all your unread articles: <pre> ¨G0G </pre> This isn’t the perfect solution because it’s a bit ugly, and lacks customization. But it does what we need it to do.

Note: Currently in beta is a new feature called Bases that will be a better built-in solution for this. But for now, a search query works, and it will be easy to swap this out for Bases once that is available to everyone.

Solution 3: Dataview

It’s no secret that I love Dataview. It’s a tremendously powerful community plugin that gives you so much power and flexibility for querying your notes. See my Getting Started with Dataview article for an introduction to this tremendous plugin. Dataview is similar to the search query above, but it has a lot more flexibility. We can create a prettier list, and we can sort it in numerous ways. First you need to enable community plugins and install Dataview, then we can create our Read It Later query. To start, paste this code into a new note: <pre> ¨G1G </pre> This query creates a simple list of all unread articles. Pretty handy! Each item in the list is a link too, so you can click on the link, read the article, check the “read” box, and this list will automatically remove articles that have been read. This is the most ergonomically friendly solution, but it does involve a little more setup, namely installing Dataview.

Importing Pocket Data

Pocket allows you to export your historical data to CSV by following these instructions. Unfortunately the Pocket export doesn’t contain the contents of articles: only links. I haven’t found a good solution for copying this data into Obsidian. My recommendation: download the CSV, and add it to an Archive folder in your Obsidian vault. If you’re like me, you won’t need most of these links anyway, so it’s not worth it to go to the trouble of properly importing these articles. If you do need a link in the future, you can search the spreadsheet and then add it to Obsidian using the Web Clipper, like you would any other article. But there’s a lot of freedom in starting fresh too, resting peacefully in the knowledge that your new Read It Later system can never be taken away from you.

Conclusion

Obsidian is a great solution to your read-it-later woes, and if you’ve never tried it before, I think you’ll like it. Obsidian gives you all the same features as a read-it-later app, but it can never be shut down, you never need to export your data, and it can do so much more than a read-it-later app to boot. I hope you give it a try, and let me know how it goes!