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Like many developers, I relied on Pocket for years to save articles for later reading. When the service shut down in 2025, I was forced to look for a replacement.

I looked around at the available options—from Obsidian Web Clipper to Notion—but nothing felt quite right. I didn’t want a complex system; I just wanted a simple buffer for my thoughts. So, I decided to build my own solution: Pokke.

Why Not Existing Tools?

Before building Pokke, I considered two popular alternatives, but neither fit my specific workflow.

Obsidian Web Clipper

I use Obsidian heavily, and while its web clipper is excellent, I found that clipping everything directly into my vault created too much noise. My Obsidian vault is for refined, permanent knowledge. Sending every interesting link there made the graph messy and difficult to navigate. I needed a staging area—a place to hold information temporarily before I decided to process it deeply.

Notion

Notion is undeniably powerful and could easily handle bookmark management. However, I simply don’t use Notion in my daily life. Adopting a massive, all-in-one workspace just to save a few URLs felt like overkill. I wanted a tool that fit into my existing habits, not one that required me to change them.

Introducing Pokke

Pokke (hosted at pokke.femto-cloud.com) is a small-scale SaaS I developed to fill this gap.

The name is a nod to its predecessor, but the philosophy is strictly personal. It is designed to be a quiet space for intellectual inquiry, free from the social features and algorithmic suggestions that have cluttered so many other services.

How It Works

I kept the architecture and workflow intentionally modest to ensure maintainability.

  • Capture: I built a simple Chrome Extension that sends the current URL to my API.
  • Storage: The backend is a lightweight cloud-deployed service that stores the links.
  • Learning: I don’t just let links rot in a list. I access my bookmarks via the API and often use Generative AI to summarize articles or extract key concepts. This helps me efficiently decide what to learn next.

It’s not a groundbreaking platform, but it’s a tool that fits my hand perfectly. Sometimes, that is all you need.