[ Skip directly to instance list ]

If you clicked on this article, there’s a good chance you already know that Firefox shut down the Read-it-later service Pocket this year, and everyone who used it has been scrambling to migrate to something else.

Pocket was deeply integrated into Kobo ereaders, so for some of us, a worthy successor needs to integrate well with Kobo.

Two of the main contenders are Instapaper (freemium, proprietary) and Wallabag (open source). (Readeck and Sako are also interesting.)

Both Instapaper and Wallabg have been around for a long time. I used both long before I switched to Pocket, in fact.

Kobo chose Instapaper, and after removing Pocket integration from their e-readers, added Instapaper support a few months later.

Wallabag doesn’t have support from the official Kobo firmware, but for technical folks, it can be used on almost any e-reader via KOReader, Wallabako, or Plato.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a public list of public Wallabag instances that allow new users to sign-up.

Until now.

So this is my start, based on the research I’ve done for my own purposes (I self-host too many services already).

List of public instances

Official instance at wallabag.it (€11/ year) (France)

G3L.org’s instance at bag.g3l.org (free) (France)

BSD Cafe’s instance at press.bsd.cafe (free) (Italy?)

I used to use Framabag (Framasoft’s Wallabag instance). After I migrated to Pocket, Framabag was shut down, and they recommend Wallabag.it, G3L, and these two paid options:

https://ethibox.fr/wallabag (paid) (France)

https://www.nomagic.uk/services/#ReadLater (paid) (England)

There is also https://wallabag.cheredeprince.net/, which seems to be free to use, and run by a French sysadmin.

A bit of context on some of the options

Wallabag.it is run by the person who created Wallabag, Nicolas Lœuillet, and funds Wallabag development. The price is reasonable, and it’s likely reliable. I created an account and imported my Pocket export during the free trial phase, and it seemed to work fine.

G3L.org is a French non-profit. It is running an older version of Wallabag.

BSD Cafe’s instance is run by a fairly well-known sysadmin who writes at https://it-notes.dragas.net/, so I assume it’s reliable. I’m not sure what the organizational structure of BSD Cafe is (if it has one). When I contacted Stefano when I had issues importing all ~4,000 articles into BSD Cafe’s instance, he responded promptly, increased the upload limit, and also updated to the latest version of Wallabag.

The wild web

There are many more instances out there, of unknown provenance and reliability.

Nobody seems to have collected them into a list yet, but maybe someone should! It would be pretty simple to write a script that would check the status and version info for instances.

But which instances are up-to-date?

Many Wallabag instances that are hosted as a public service by kind volunteers aren’t running the latest version of Wallabag. In some cases, the version that they are running might not have features you want (for example, Pocket CSV import was added after v2.6.12), and might be less secure.

There is an about page that lists this information for logged-in users at /about, but you can also check which version of Wallabag an instance you’re thinking of signing up for is running by going to the /api/info/ URL for the instance. (Thanks to Holger for telling me about this.)

For example: https://app.wallabag.it/api/info/ shows that it’s running the dev branch of the latest public release.

https://press.bsd.cafe/api/info/ shows that it’s running the latest version.

https://bag.g3l.org/api/info/ is a 404 (though inconvenient for us, keeping the exact software version a website is running hidden from bad bots is good security practice, especially if it’s an old version.)

The "allows_registration" field doesn’t seem 100% accurate, since all three services allowed new accounts to be created at the time I tested, even though only some of them have allowed_registrataion set to true. YMMV.

Large imports

By default, most Wallabag instances have a fairly small Nginx client_max_body_size. My export is close to 100MB for ~4,000 articles, so there’s no way that’s gonna work. The PHP memory limit can also be an issue when processing large imports.

Whether self-hosting or using a hosted instance, if you have a moderate to large number of articles and are trying to import JSON, you will probably need to update these settings in nginx.conf and php.ini (or Docker environment variables), or get the system admin to do it for you.

You might not notice this right away: importing my ~600kb Pocket CSV into wallabag.it worked fine. It was only when I started testing data portability between Wallabag instances (which includes the full HTML content, rather than just the URLs) that this became an issue.

I have yet to find any free instance that can process my full JSON export without throwing 413 or 500 errors. Whether this is an issue with Wallabag, the instances in question, or my supposedly-valid JSON data, I don’t know.

My opinion

I haven’t picked a home instance yet. Wallabag.it, BSD Cafe, G3L, or self-hosting all seem like viable options.