I have been an Instapaper user for many years. From the time it was free, to paid, and then free and paid. For a while I was feeding Instapaper articles through Readwise to Obsidian. I couldn’t get Readwise to pull in comments from Instapaper articles that I’d archived. From memory I’m not even sure it could see them.
A few months ago I dropped Readwise and this evening I dropped Instapaper.
I’ve been hearing about an alternative read later app1 called Omnivore via the #obsidian tag on Mastodon. So, I took a look. My initial impressions and testing were strong enough for me to move across. This is inline with my practice of relying on software to properly learn its value and form an easy way to collate information for my Personal Knowledge Management (perhaps too easy!).
Thoughts:
- There is slightly more friction in getting an article into Omnivore that Instapaper on IOS. News Explorer, my RSS reader, has a native interaction for Instapaper, but not Omnivore.
- Omnivore is free. Instapaper requires a Pro subscription to use notes.
- Omnivore provides the means to create an Omnivore email address and use it to subscribe to newsletters instead of my own. I had been forwarding email newsletters to Instapaper for later reading. This saves me a step and Omnivore formats them better.
- I can import into Obsidian directly from my Omnivore account, protected via an API key. No need for the middle manager of Readwise. This also allows me to bring the full text of the article into Obsidian so that my notes are in context, I have full search in the future, and protection against the loss of the original article.
- Omnivore is open source.