After getting burned by Pocket, I moved everything into a self-hosted setup.
Current stack:
- FreshRSS for feed ingestion
- Readeck for actual reading
- Linkwarden for long-term storage
Running on Docker Swarm behind Traefik, internal-only. Remote access via WireGuard.
A few gotchas that took longer than expected:
- Readeck container entrypoint pointing at /readeck (dir) instead of /bin/readeck
- Linkwarden auth issues due to build-time NEXT_PUBLIC_* vars
- Had to seed the first user manually in Postgres with bcrypt
- Internal SMTP relay quirks between services
It’s definitely more work than SaaS, but the upside is ownership.
Full write-up with configs + fixes: https://clifmo.com/blog/posts/saas-is-temporary-your-reading-list-doesnt-have-to-be
Curious what others are using for this now. I considered Wallabag but opted for Readeck, even tho the Readeck Android app has a crash loop right now (for me).
Thanks for writing that up! I’m curious: what makes you use Readeck for some things and Linkwarden for others? It seems like they have the same use case, and pretty much the same features.
I’ve been using wallabag for quite a while, before Linkwarden and Readeck were written, and I haven’t felt a reason to switch away from it.
A thing I like doing with wallabag is:
- Select a bunch of articles that I want to read on my ebook reader
- Tag them as “exported_on_2026-04-02”
- Export them as an epub
- The epub is synced automatically by syncthing to my ebook reader (it’s like an eink Android tablet)
- Once I’ve read that file on the ebook reader, select all entries tagged with “exported_on_2026-04-02” and mark them as read. Or just mark them as read right away, since I’ll definitely get to them once they’re on the ebook reader.
I haven’t found any other bookmarking applications that can conveniently tag articles in bulk, export, and then mark as read in bulk like wallabag. From the website, it looks like Readeck can, I’ll have to check it out.
I self host wallabag for this. Unfortunately, I don’t use it that much. I end up with a bunch of tabs.
I use it too. My main issue is that when I’m entering tag names on a new article, it doesn’t suggest existing tags. Makes it very difficult to keep the number of tags limited. I might create #environment when #climate is what I would usually use.
Go figure, my ISP went down and my self-hosted blog is temporarily unavailable. I have a backup internet connection and fail-over WAN, so I didn’t even notice the blip thanks to pfsense.
But I need dynamic DNS or to use Cloudflare’s load balancers or something. Anyone have experience with this?
I use KaraKeep for this and couldn’t be happier.
Do you subscribe to karakeep lists? Are they of infinite length?
- Readeck for read it later articles
- Linkwarden for important links
- tt-rss for feed ingestion
Genuine question: why not just read on FreshRSS? What am I missing?
Not the OP but:
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FreshRSS interface is kind of ugly (probably can be tweaked). You can use third party RSS readers, but that ends up being almost as much work as installing readeck and the like.
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FreshRSS doesn’t support OPDS or have any koreader integration, unlike readeck. These are essential features for reading on an e-ink reader, which is my preferred way to read longer articles in particular.
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Not every site makes RSS available. Edit: and generally, I have so many RSS feeds, I’m scanning and looking for interesting things. At that point, I rarely have time to sit and read a long-form article. Rather than favorite it, mark it as unread or try to find it later, I send it to Readeck for when I’m ready to focus.
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It’s actually kind of crazy what amount of tech people have to use just to save a webpage for later reading.
But also it’s kind of awesome.
… just to save a webpage which they tell themselves they’ll read later (but probably won’t) …
I include myself in this
