I know I said Wallabag won, but I spun up a Readeck instance with one Docker command, and it’s really impressive.

The main thing that caught my attention? The pageload times are insanely fast.

Here is a local install of Readeck serving the all articles page (with ~4,000 articles imported from Pocket CSV):

It’s definitely not apples-to-apples because it’s a hosted instance (so no network latency, probably lower specs than my laptop), but here’s the page size and timings for a … different read it later app, with ~30 articles in the archive, loading the unread view (zero articles):

I had originally passed over Readeck for three reasons:

1. Wallabag has tighter Kobo/KOReader integration
2. I’m not a data hoarder (no, really, I’m not!) who needs or wants a complete forever archive of all the articles I’ve read, with images and everything.
3. It’s new, and apps like this come and go all the time

I tried importing my Pocket CSV. It seemed to be doing a pretty good job of fetching the content until the internet glitched. I didn’t figure out a way to resume fetching articles from an import. At this point I discovered another thing: unlike Wallabag etc, there didn’t seem to be a way to bulk-delete articles (either using bulk actions from a filter view, or a delete everything button on the user profile page). Annoying! It’s on the roadmap, though.

(I ended up deleting my readeck-data Docker volume and starting over.)

Things I don’t like about Readeck:

1. What I just mentioned: the lack of bulk editing
2. There aren’t any hosted instances (yet)
3. No option to limit complete archiving to starred articles, or disable images and just save fulltext, or disable content extraction entirely and just save URLs and metadata (personally, I want it to save fulltext for starred articles, and Internet Archive Wayback Machine links for everything else)
4. I haven’t found a way to manually re-fetch content for a specific article or set of articles, the way you can with Wallabag
5. It can pull from the Wallabag API for imports, but it can’t import Wallabag JSON
6. It has .zip exports that can be imported into Readeck, but doesn’t support exporting to a format that can be imported into other Read-it-later services without munging (having seen so many services come and go, seamless data portability is just about the #1 feature I look for; it bugs me when software puts more care into their import process than they do into exports, though I see the logic)

Things I don’t know yet:

1. What will the monetization strategy will be in the long run? Will all features be available to self-hosters, like Wallabag?
2. How does the failed-to-fetch-content percentage compare to Wallabag and Instapaper?
3. How long will it exist?

More things I like about Readeck:

1. It feels solid, simple, and well-built.
2. You can use SQLite or PostgreSQL
3. You can try it with a single Docker command (and it just works)
4. It has an API, and pretty much all the features I need
5. The development is on an open-source forge (Codeberg) rather than GitHub
6. There are (unoffical) KOReader plugins in development (https://github.com/iceyear/readeck.koplugin, https://github.com/flip-rossi/readeck.koplugin), and a maybe-abandoned pull request for Plato.
7. It’s the one supported backend for kobo-pocket-proxy, which allows you to use the default Kobo instapaper interface with an open-source, self-hosted backend.
8. People say it works great as an OPDS provider for KOReader on a Kobo
9. The resource requirements are modest (512mb ram, 200mb storage)
10. The full text search seems to work (and is really fast)
11. Did I mention that it’s one of the fastest-loading apps I’ve used?!

Readeck is developed by Olivier Meunier. It’s cool, check it out.