This is an inherent value trap that’s really not sustainable for VC backed startups. Which will inevitably burn to the ground as the revenue dwindles. Pocket, Omnivore, Upnext, your next favorite server based read-later app. One of the reason I believe is the market is saturated with undifferentiated apps that’s all free.
While I think self-hosting is great, you probably want to solve mobile capturing and consumption, hosting a server, then paring a modern maintained mobile app that you can configure so it connects to your self-hosted server. Omnivore maybe your best shot? Although maybe vibe code may get you there sooner?
If you are on Apple ecosystem though, there is another self-sustainable way that doesn’t require you to host anything on your VPS, that works with mobile, which is iCloud/Cloudkit based apps.
There are at least a dozen options here. I made one of these:
- no account, no server, no tracking
- Liquid Glass Mac app that launch from menu bar.
- Separate iOS app purposefully designed for mobile
- Doesn’t use a browser extension, but monitors double copies from clipboard.
- Shows all the cards in a waterfall grid, so you don’t have to click into these cards to see what the link is about. Every website you use, from TikTok to GoodReads, will show up as well designed cards.
- Uses Apple Intelligence on device to auto-tag links.
- free to capture without limit, has a one time purchase option (that removes the sub nudge) as well as affordable subscription option with PPP in 10 territories (purchase power parity pricing).
I believe it’s the sweet spot in this category, and with the subscription revenue we have, it will never shutdown as long as Apple still offers iCloud, plus, you own the binary.
One way to reframe the question is to ask: why social media took over and what RSS can do to catch up?
I got a theory but curious about others thoughts.
My theory is barrier to entry, network density, lurker effect, UX, dopamine and attention economy loop, content recommendation etc all fell behind.
One hint is how TikTok’s old parent company started as a content aggregator and still runs one of the biggest one in china called Toutiao.
Also plug my tiny contribution to fix the inconsistent reading experience of rss ready blogs without installing an app: https://feedable.doublememory.com
Controversial opinion: it's not about the generator of the content, human or not, but about the originality of the content itself. Human with the help of AI will generate more good quality as a result.
Humans are just as good as bots in generating rubbish content, if not more so.
Twitter reduced content production cost significantly, AI can take it another step down.
At minimum, a social network where people share good prompt engineering techniques will be valuable to people who are on the hunt for prompts. Just like the Midjourney website, except creating a high quality image is no longer a trip to the beach, but a thought experiment. This will also significantly cut down the cold start friction and in combination with some free credits, people may have more reasons to stay, as the current chat based business model may reach it's limit for revenue generation and retention, as it's just single player mode.
Amazfit and Xiaomi is now dominating this market with its superior riscv based architecture and 2x longer battery time and 2x less cost. I don’t really know how pebble can compete now given when it was acquired it was already going downhill in market share.
I’ve never earned a pebble only an Xiaomi band many years ago so I maybe missing something.
While I think self-hosting is great, you probably want to solve mobile capturing and consumption, hosting a server, then paring a modern maintained mobile app that you can configure so it connects to your self-hosted server. Omnivore maybe your best shot? Although maybe vibe code may get you there sooner?
If you are on Apple ecosystem though, there is another self-sustainable way that doesn’t require you to host anything on your VPS, that works with mobile, which is iCloud/Cloudkit based apps.
There are at least a dozen options here. I made one of these:
- no account, no server, no tracking
- Liquid Glass Mac app that launch from menu bar.
- Separate iOS app purposefully designed for mobile
- Doesn’t use a browser extension, but monitors double copies from clipboard.
- Shows all the cards in a waterfall grid, so you don’t have to click into these cards to see what the link is about. Every website you use, from TikTok to GoodReads, will show up as well designed cards.
- Uses Apple Intelligence on device to auto-tag links.
- free to capture without limit, has a one time purchase option (that removes the sub nudge) as well as affordable subscription option with PPP in 10 territories (purchase power parity pricing).
I believe it’s the sweet spot in this category, and with the subscription revenue we have, it will never shutdown as long as Apple still offers iCloud, plus, you own the binary.
It’s at https://doublememory.com if this sounds interesting to you.