Omnivore alternatives?
I created an Omnivore account recently and I started to love it. I thought to self-host it but I didn't have enough time and thought I'd host it later.
I (along with everyone else presumably) got this email today:
We’re excited to share that Omnivore is joining forces with ElevenLabs, the leading AI audio research and technology company. Our team is joining ElevenLabs to help drive the future of accessible reading and listening with their new ElevenReader app.
Next, all Omnivore users will be able to export their information from the service through November 15 2024, after which all information will be deleted.
Though it is quite frustrating, I will not go further in my opinion of this move.
I would just like to let the community know that I'm in the market for an alternative for this... or maybe some help how to self-host it. I don't even know if it will be easy to self-host or if it will be worth it, presumably without updates...
Wallabag is gonna be your best bet if you want to self host an alternative. My understanding of Omnivore's self hosted option is that it's quite finicky and relies on a bunch of third party services anyways (This is just what I've gathered through research - I have no experience with it myself!)
Thanks, I'm trying it out now!
I've since deployed Wallabag on my VPS and downloaded / installed compatible iPhone apps to read.
I am trying a setup where I have FreshRSS to collect the feeds and Wallabag to bag the articles I'm interested in. Dunno if that would work.
This is the setup I've been using for a while now and am pretty happy with it. You probably already saw that FreshRSS supports Wallabag sharing right out of the box, and you can combine that with using CSS selectors to scrape full content on feeds that need it. I never used Omnivore so I can't really offer a comparison, but I can say that if I had to use the Wallabag app(s) available for Android I'd probably be looking for an alternative because the UI/UX on those (at least when I was trying them out) was not great. The way I use Wallabag is I let a few months worth of backlog build up, then use its export-to-epub feature to download them all together in a giant ebook, and read that on my Kobo over the next few months while the next backlog is building up (I'm a slow reader).
The problem with Wallabag to me is that the UX is absolutely terrible. It's a reading app, but with a poorly finished typography settings, etc.
I'm saying this because I'm also looking for an alternative now...
I use nextcloud so i just use nextcloud bookmarks (simple link saving thing) and nextcloud news (RSS reader).
Hoarder is another self-hosted option along side Wallabag. It also has a mobile app, and caches the contents of articles. I'd skip the AI tagging stuff, personally, but it's an ok feature.
I use Omnivore more as a place where I read my newsletter subscriptions than as a place where I save articles. I like the fact that I can subscribe to newsletters by giving them my Omnivore email address, that way my personal email does not get leaked. And also the fact that all newsletters are in one place and outside my email inbox is a huge relief when it comes to taming my email.
From what I've seen, I'm not sure I see any of the services listed on this thread offers that. If there is one, I'd love to know.
This is one of the things I do with Inoreader. I love not having my email box cluttered with newsletters. Added bonus is they appear side by side with all my other RSS feeds.
Wallabag can be the chosen if their UX is not so terrible. But it is.
I'm a big fan of Readeck. It's easy to run your own at PikaPods.
So what specifically do you use Omnivore for? From what I can see, it’s both a repository for saved articles and headlines while also having access to a RSS reader. Do you use it primarily for the former or latter?
On self-hosted tools to save articles, studies, books, etc, I use Zotero. It’s compatible with online cloud services that can use a backup in addition to being able to be used both by desktop and mobile services.
I use Linkwarden (self-hosted on a home server) as it does bookmarks and archival copies of the pages I "bookmark" with it. There's an iOS app that works well.
If you have a need to archive an entire site or a huge selection of pages, archivebox can do it, but it's less user friendly.
https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/4462
On their GitHub people are discussing alternatives as well.
This is from an iOS user's perspective. For the last few days I've been using a mix of GoodLinks, Shortcuts, and markdown files to replace Omnivore.
I use GoodLinks to save and read articles later. The UI is decent and leagues ahead of trying to shoehorn Obsidian into a reader. Apps that are editor focused first tend to be poor readers and vice versa. GoodLinks has two drawbacks though. The first is that it cannot save content that you see on the page, the way that Omnivore did, so paywalls can be an issue. I rely on archive.is here.
The second is that it only syncs links, not content. If you save the webpage on one device, then it changes, your next device that installs GoodLinks will not have the original content. Dead links can break you here and data is not permanent. The dev has stated before that they're looking into syncing content, but I do not rely on promises here. For backup, I use GoodLinks's excellent iOS Shortcuts integration to export data of links I've starred or read. The markdown (and plaintext version) files go into iCloud Drive and I am considering putting them into a git repo.
The other benefit of exporting data is that I can delete older articles in the future when I've saved too many links. Since GoodLinks downloads links anew on new devices, having 5000 saved links could mean all 5000 get re-downloaded on install, but I suspect that read links do not automatically download (have not tested).
I've watched enough apps die that data export is my only criteria, in case I need to search the raw data in the future, so I am grateful to the GoodLinks dev for building in Shortcuts integrations. Still, the solution feels a bit messy and I'm looking forward to the next generation of apps in this area.
Edit: I will share the Shortcut if anyone is interested; it's a very straightforward one.