General
Developers
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Welcome to the FAQ page. You will have fun here.
Pinefore's goal is to help users collect content that's popular on other sites, and discover more content they might like. It facilitates this in a number of ways, like
Plus more coming very soon:
We are adding another layer to the browser, a layer that brings you closer to the content you consume. We envision the web as a creative, connected and passionate space, a space that places the spirit of curiosity and discovery above mindless consumption.
First, unlike other services, it is in our best interest to make you happy. If you are not happy, you will stop sending us money, and that would not be good for businesses. Comparatively, most social sites have perverse incentives to keep you on their site, so that they can display more ads to you. Technically, it is in my best interest to keep you away from my site, to reduce costs. Luckily, the costs per user are low, but the point remains: I want you to get the things you are looking for as fast as possible.
If you're wondering how Pinefore compares to software like Reddit, Lemmy and Hacker News, it all comes down to catagorization. These services are "link aggregators". People submit content to these sites that they expect other readers will enjoy. Your home page is curated by others. You are discouraged from submitting content that you are interested in, but the rest of the community isn't. This can be a good thing, but this is not how Pinefore works. Pinefore puts the preferences and curation of you front and center. Ranking algorithms for community features on Pinefore work best when people do their own thing — completely oblivious to the larger world. Pinefore is your home, and link aggregators are times square.
If you are familiar with del.icio.us (or pinboard), you will be familar with Pinefore.
Speaking of Pinboard, the main difference between us is the number of auxiliary features offered. Pinboard is largely regarded as "complete" by its author. This is wonderful, there incredible merrit to completed software. Many pinboard users are very happy with the service, and I share a number of philosophical similarities to its author. By contrast, Pinefore is new. It is growing. It is actively getting better. It aims to be what Pinboard would have been if it was written in 2024.
Under the Terms of Service, using our data to train generative AI is not allowed. Pinefore attempts to downrank content that is produced with generative AI, mostly through user flagging (I have not been able to detect it with accuracy reliable enough to do it automatically).
Pinefore currently uses generative AI in the following locations:
Pinefore does not currently make use of machine learning in its recommendation engine.
Pinefore has a particular interest in building a strong reccomendations system. We're lucky enough to have strong user heuristics by nature of the tag system. In the future, I'm interested in using an embeddings model to supercharge content reccomendations and search, so we can answer questions like "What articles are related to this?" in a technique similar to what is described here. More importantly, I'm interested to see just how far I can get without doing embeddings, which are expensive. Especially as the entire system is already built on user tagging, which negates embeddings significantly.
They were bound to come up eventually
Instead of your data, this thing costs money. Our pricing is incredibly easy to understand. You pay us $24 a year. If you are worried by the fact that 50% of the web rots in 10 years, and you want us to download everything you save to our servers automatically, you can pay $12 additional dollars a year for Pinefore Archive.
If you don't speak American, the pricing will be localized. If you cannot afford Pinefore for any reason, you can reach out to me and propose a price. I will try to accommodate you.
A lot of the site can be used without logging in. In addition, there is a trial for up to 7 days.
Pinefore costs $24 USD. We hope it will be worth it to you. This relationship keeps our incentives focused on you. We don't need to worry about losses from our free tier, or conversions.
You. Pinefore does not have investors. Pinefore can be profitable at only 3 users, and we have more than that. This means we are winning the startup game, as far as I'm concerned.
While Pinefore is owned by me at Toastcat LLC, it operates like a B Corp. Once Pinefore makes sufficient enough income to sustain me, a portion of revenue will be used to sustain the web. How will this work?
I'm glad you asked because I do like standards. Pinefore supports the following APIs:
pinefore.com/api/pinboard/v1/pinefore.com/api/greader/ with some of its extentions. A normal app using the Google Reader API should be fine.
X-BQ-LoginErrorReason as well, you should really be looking at the status. A 402 indicates payment is required.pinefore.com/api/fever/.If your client only takes a domain and gets messed up by the fact that the prefixes are non-standard, you will soon be able to use the following proxies: pinboardapi.pinefore.com, greaderapi.pinefore.com, feverapi.pinefore.com. (These proxies do not work right now. If you need them reach out to me below). One current limitation of the compatibility layer is that errors can be non-standard in some cases.
Feedlog can follow RSS feeds. You can follow the RSS feeds of Pinefore users by adding .rss to the end of the URL.
In some cases, we offer supersets on top of these APIs to support our additional features. Unfortunately these supersets are not currently documented.
See /api/doc for documentation.
Yes, a lot of the personal aspects of the site work offline. By default, the extension will save your last 1000 bookmarks. This will take less than a megabyte. You can change this number in settings. CUD operations will happen on your client and then sync to the server. Note that the conflict resolution algorithm isn't great so if you change the same item on two devices, the most recently changed version will win.
I am not in the business of selling your data. Pinefore is a social service, however. You can make individual pins private, and make them private by default.
Yes you can. And it will happen fast. Like it goes into a queue immediately. It goes fast enough that you don't need to leave the page. If you do leave the page, we will email it to you. Actually, we will email it to you regardless.
Pinefore is designed in a way condusive to progressive enhancement — a little work will go a long way in this department. Beyond SSR, however, we have not yet made a concerted effort to make the site work without JavaScript.
The actual JavaScript that is shipped to the client predominantly consists of Solid.js — a lightweight library for reactive apps, and Kobalte — a UI library that handles accessibility. In payment flows, Paddle.js is also loaded.
I might die.
Pinefore can be divided into 4 components:
The apps and the extension are both open source. The frontend & backend are developed in a monorepo, and that monorepo is about 25% open source. The open source components includes most middleware and helper functions. The closed source code is mostly the "glue" between these interesting pieces (eg. the router, the database). We are ultimately running a business, and we intend to offer paying customers the very best. The success of the business allows me to devote more time to the project, and more money to the indieweb. By open sourcing the more interesting parts, we intend to foster a community of "competitors" on the fediverse, that offer different takes on this problem. In other words, instead of a homogenous cluster of instances, we want many unique varients.
One of the founding philosophies is that talking to customers is the best way to make your product great. I really really really want to talk to you, so if you email me I will respond. Send me feature ideas, bugs, painpoints, love, memes, really anything. I'll respond.
Because robots ruined the internet: My name is Evan Boehs. My email is (my first name)@(my last name).org
Also, if I send you an email asking for feedback, I actually sent that email myself. Its not automated or anything. I genuinely want to hear from you.