Dear Pinboard, I'm breaking up with you. It's me and it's you.

June 16, 2026 2 min read

Welp, I'm doing it. I'm canceling my Pinboard subscription. I've actually been a Pinboard customer for a very long time. I found Pinboard way back in 2010 when Yahoo said they were sunsetting Delicious. It's my second longest used service with first going to Last.fm. My first scrobble was all the way back in 2005:

🎸 Metallica – "Damage, Inc." on 13 February 2005, 11:59 PM (UTC)

Anywho, I've noticed for a while now that there isn't really anything new happening with the site, which I thought was a cool feature and not a bug. The site looks dated and the apps available for it are basic. It has the slight feeling of an abandoned project if you look at it just right. The developer (Maciej Cegłowski) just keeps the lights on because I assume he's getting a fair amount of income from subscriptions so he just has a couple servers in a co-location data center.

I think the main things that attracted me to the service was it was a deliberately minimal, anti-VC, anti-ad bookmarking service. Over time, I've realized that Maciej isn't really a FOSS advocate, which was fine at first but I've drifted more and more in that direction myself.

Lately, I've been self-hosting more and more services so I can reduce my subscriptions and have more control over my digital footprint. I originally opted to keep Pinboard as a paid service because I liked that it was a person and not a corporation.

Today, Pinboard let their domain name expire. Oops. That's not a good look but that's whatever. Someone linked to what looked like an announcement from Maciej about the outage so I clicked it... and was delivered to a post by Maciej on X. 😑

I have an irrational, burning hatred for Elon Musk. He represents the very worst that humanity has to offer. When I saw that Maciej still uses X, that was it for me. I can excuse and look past all the rest but not this and not today.

So, I've spent the last hour building out a little bookmarking service that integrates and is hosted on my homelab. I have a bookmarklet that I put on Firefox and boom presto, I'm back in business.