The news about Pocket shutting down hit us a couple of weeks ago, and I was on the hunt for an alternative. I came across this Reddit thread, and the most recommended service seemed to be Raindrop.io.

I, however, went with Instapaper. The reasoning behind this is that I use Feedly as my RSS service, and I use the Reeder app on my devices to actually read my RSS feeds. Reeder also lets you choose Read Later apps like Pocket and Instapaper. I never used Pocket as the Read Later service on Reeder, but seeing Instapaper there made the decision for me. This meant I could free up a spot on my primary iPhone Home Screen for another app.

What’s ironic is, about a decade ago, I tried both Pocket and Instapaper—and I chose Pocket. And here I am now, back with Instapaper. If I’d gone with Instapaper in the first place, I guess I wouldn’t be here. But there was definitely something back then that made me pick Pocket over Instapaper.

Here’s how I moved over from Pocket to Instapaper:

1. Read/archived/deleted most of the items I could get rid of. My Pocket app had 134 articles to read. I was on a 4-hour flight without Wi-Fi and managed to bring it down to 69 articles. On a side note, I also watched For a Few Dollars More for the first time—and it was brilliant. Guess you can really get stuff done when you’re not on the internet.
2. Exported the CSV file of my Pocket saves. As soon as I did this, it said it could take up to 7 days, but I got the email within 10 minutes.
3. Logged into my Instapaper account, which I already had from almost a decade ago and I was surprised it was still active. I deleted all the old articles that was here (from my brief stint trying out the app).
4. Imported the CSV from step 2 – it said “check back later”, but only took around 5 minutes.
5. I had an IFTTT applet that auto-saved my ‘Read Later’ items from Feedly to Pocket. I turned that off and found a similar one that saves from Feedly to Instapaper instead. IFTTT applets can be a bit finicky. I’m just hoping this will work, if not I’ll spend the next few days troubleshooting.

That was it. All done.

Will I stick to Instapaper, or will I be checking out Raindrop.io in a few days? Who knows. I just hope this works for me. Over a decade ago, it was an easy choice to make as there weren’t many alternatives. But today, there are loads of these services, and picking the right one can take up way too much time when you’re given too many choices. Sometimes, having too many choices can be a bad thing too.