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).

  • tuckerm@feddit.onlineEnglish
    1·
    16 hours ago

    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:

    1. Select a bunch of articles that I want to read on my ebook reader
    2. Tag them as “exported_on_2026-04-02”
    3. Export them as an epub
    4. The epub is synced automatically by syncthing to my ebook reader (it’s like an eink Android tablet)
    5. 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.

    • clifmo@programming.devOPEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      That’s pretty neat. I don’t use an e-reader and I’m not here proselytizing my workflow. But, to me, tools are usually best at one or two things, even though they might cover 20. That was my impression of wallabag. It had a lot of history and covered some niche workflows.

      Linkwarden to me has one purpose, long-term archive and storage. So it has a different Restic backup policy since it outputs hard copies. It integrates with local LLM inference to tag and whatnot. I don’t spend much time in its beautiful interface, nor do I use the social features. I’d be just as happy with a more minimal tool.

      It’s very helpful to be able to cite exact sources 10 years down the road, pulling from a hard copy. Especially with how fast the world moves today, the turmoil in the media and elected government.