Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you wanted to zap it to, so that later when you’re not anxiously toggling between the same seven feed aggregators for fifteen seconds at a time, like maybe you’re waiting in line in the grocery store and you can’t do the NYT mini because they’re on strike and you don’t cross picket lines and god forbid you have a single second of mental silence, you can open the app and begrudgingly educate yourself on something that you alleged wanted to learn about at some point in time.

I’ve been using and ignoring read-later apps since the launch of Instapaper in 2008, because precocious little dorks who cry when they realize that they will never read all the books in the world grow up to be weary adults who transfer that Sisyphean energy to hoarding thought-provoking New Yorker longreads they will also never have time to read. Omnivore was different than the apps I had previously been using though, because it could also handle RSS feeds and gave me an email to forward newsletters to, which means that in addition to whatever ten thousand word essay about web components that I was guiltily neglecting in favour of playing Threes for the fifteen-millionth time, it could also collect all the emails and blogs I keep meaning to get around. All my informational FOMO concentrated in one area, and I get less shit in my inbox? Win-win.

I moved all my digital crap over to Omnivore on July 27th, 2024. I know this because I ran into a glitch with the import tool and had to contact the developers, so it was timestamped. On October 29th, Omnivore announced that it had been acquired by an AI company and would be shutting down on November 14th: you’ve got two weeks to get your shit out or we’re deleting the whole thing. (In their infinite magnanimity they’ve since expanded the grace period to November 30th.)

I don’t know why this specific thing is the thing that got to me but I am fucking furious. I was on Omnivore for all of three lousy months! For various professional and personal reasons I will not go into here, these have been among the most stressful three months of my entire goddamn life, I have not felt like I could catch my breath for at least six weeks, on top of which we’re all treading water like deranged ducks trying to stave off the terror of what will be swept up in the deluge when empires fall, and now you’re fucking telling me I have fifteen days to find another goddamn solution for keeping my little bits of text corralled?? We live in this godforsaken information ecosystem where more data than our puny little brains can handle in a lifetime bombard us every nanosecond, an increasing amount of it being spat out by Tormentus Scrapus™ sponsored by OpenAI and the devaluation of all creative labour, and trying to be a conscientious and thoughtful consumer of information is exhausting, not letting your entire capacity for critical thought be suborned by cascading skinner boxes of shitty incentives and UI anti-patterns takes active fucking effort, and I am trying so hard to click “reject all” on every metaphorical cookie banner in my life, and now this??

Yeah, yeah, I should’ve known better than to trust Omnivore when I found out that they didn’t have a premium option and didn’t even really have it on their roadmap to build one, because of course that is not a sustainable business model and was inevitably going to bite me in the ass. But you know what, I shouldn’t have to understand the business models of every little icon on my stupid pocket supercomputer to get through life! Why am I reading books on VC funding just to figure out what parts of my digital life will inevitably decay when the money guys get their hands on it?? And don’t tell me about enshittification, that is a thought-terminating cliche that does not actually perform useful or interesting analysis and is little more than the new “just use linux” of annoying Fediverse reply guys.

The only reason I even moved to Omnivore is because Mozilla has been systematically neglecting and underfunding Pocket for years and the app is increasingly dominated by things I did not save, the literal one job it had, and I had moved to Pocket after Instapaper first changed ownership in 2013 or whatever and I didn’t like the new owners, and I also can’t go back to Pinboard because while I used to love that dude’s writing he’s turning into a transphobic crank so fuck that, but like, why do I even know that?? Why do I know what the owner of my bookmarking service thinks?? Why do I know that that one 37signals guy is a creep and a nasty weirdo which is why I will never pay for their email service which otherwise seems pretty cool, why do I know that Brave is the homophobic browser in bed with cryptocurrency bros, why do I know that the Kagi dude thinks adding suicide prevention hotlines to search results for “how to kill yourself” is censorship, why do I know about Mr. John Wordpress’s entire extended midlife meltdown?? The modern world is unbelievably stupid, and if you don’t pay attention to the stupidity then when something bad happens someone shows up in your notifications all like, well what did you expect. I expect you to fuck off!!

One of the other options Omniverse suggests for moving off of its service is self-hosting, which is akin to telling me to go fuck myself. Self-hosting is great if your hobby is self-hosting things. Mine is not. My hobbies are reading things and drawing things and sewing things and climbing up things and feeling guilty about not writing enough things. I very much appreciate that I know how to computer well enough that I could self-host if I had to, could go fork some abandoned Obsidian plugin that hasn’t been updated in 3 years to try and make yet another rotting part of my digital ecosystem rot a little bit less slowly, but that is a terrible use of my time. I already host my own Fediverse server, if by host you mean pay someone in Europe a bunch of money to host it for me and all I have to do is ban some assholes occasionally, because at the moment I have more money than I have time and I simply do not wish to spend my one wild and precious life learning how to configure goddamn Sidekiq to optimize background processing queues just so I can offer my friends a refuge from the dillweed who turned Twitter into a Nazi bar.

Also, you know what people never talk about when they talk about self-hosting? A succession plan. If I suddenly died I don’t have any provisions for making sure the people relying on my little Hometown server aren’t suddenly left up a creek without a paddle. I am not going to host a read-later service just for myself because that would be an incredibly inefficient use of time and resources even if I did have the time and inclination to do so, but I am also not going to host anything else for my friends until I figure out what contingency plans look like. It’s on my list of things to figure out for my will, which is a very long list. This long list sits on another very long list of life TODOs that I never seem to get around to. I have wanted to figure out my will for approximately eight years, and I know that because that is how long ago I got married and we were like “ha ha we should do that soon” and then simply never did. Because life is so complicated, my guy.

I’m 35. I have loved being in my 30s, even if it largely did not look like the way I expected it to look. Being in my 30s has been so much better than being in my 20s in basically every way, with the exception that I am so much more tired now. I used to take redeye flights when I came back to the east coast from San Francisco and work a whole normal day the next day and I simply cannot do that anymore, my body will mutiny. Every way I turn I am having to scale back on my ambitions of what I can accomplish. I am simply not going to be able to maintain a suite of healthy and fulfilling friendships and nurture a loving marriage and raise a teenager I wasn’t expecting to raise and be great at all of my hobbies while also participating in direct action mutual aid and harassing my elected representatives for being shitheel cowards and working a full-time job and keeping up with new frontend frameworks in my spare time and I guess learning Rust because apparently that is the thing that will optimize my employability once AI has eaten my corner of the software world. I do not have enough time in the day. No one has enough time in the day! The thing about getting older is that it is a process of accumulation, you accumulate people and stuff and responsibilities and moral obligations, and you can only Marie Kondo yourself out of so much of it. My dentist gets on me about flossing and I want to be like, motherfucker when? I know it’s only a couple of minutes a day but do you know how few minutes we all have?? Did you know the earth is going up in flames??? And you want me to FLOSS???? And host my own read-later service????? Why is this the reality we live in?????? Butlerian jihad when???????

I don’t have a conclusion. I’m just mad, and it’s the day of the American goddamn election, and I needed to be mad at something other than politics for a couple of hours and maybe this will entertain you for a couple of minutes. I hope you’re doing as well as can be expected, and taking care of yourself, except if you’re a Trump supporter, in which case I hope you fall off a cliff, TIA.