A Pocket Alternative for Saving Tweets and Social Media Posts
Published by
If you used Pocket to save tweets and other social posts, Birdfeeder can take over that part. It keeps a searchable copy of everything you bookmark on X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr, using the bookmark button you already have. It is not a read-later app for articles, so if most of your Pocket list was long reads from the web, you need a different tool for those.
That split matters, so this post goes through what Birdfeeder covers and what it doesn't.
What happened to Pocket?
Mozilla announced on May 22, 2025 that it would shut Pocket down. The service stopped on July 8, 2025, and exports stayed available until October 8, 2025, when accounts were deleted. If you missed that export window, your Pocket list is gone.
A lot of people I talked to used Pocket as a catch-all. Articles went in, but so did tweets, threads and Mastodon posts, because the share sheet made it easy. When Pocket went away, the articles had obvious replacements. The social posts were the awkward part.
Can I just use the bookmark button on X or Bluesky instead?
You can, and that's what I do. The problem is what happens after you press it.
On X, the bookmarks tab is a long list with no search box. I wrote about that in Why X's Bookmark Tab Has No Search Box. Bluesky and Mastodon are similar: you can scroll back through your saves, but finding one specific post from six months ago means a lot of scrolling. And if the author deletes the post or their account gets suspended, the bookmark stops working. Nobody keeps a copy for you.
Pocket at least stored its own copy of what you saved. The native bookmark tabs don't.
What does Birdfeeder do with my bookmarks?
You connect your X, Bluesky or Mastodon account, and Nostr through your public key if you use it. From then on, every post you bookmark on those networks lands in one archive. You keep saving posts the same way you do today. There's no browser extension and no share sheet step.
Once a post is in the archive, you get:
- full-text search across every bookmark from every network, in one search box (search)
- a stored copy of the post text and media, so a deleted post or suspended account doesn't take your save with it (backup)
- a weekly email with what you saved that week, plus a few older bookmarks you probably forgot about (weekly summary, archive picks)
- a private note field on every bookmark, for the reason you saved it (notes)
- an RSS or JSON feed of your bookmarks, if you want to read them in a feed reader (feeds)
- export to CSV, TSV, JSON or Excel
The weekly email is the part that comes closest to what Pocket was for me. The point of saving something is to come back to it, and I rarely did that by opening an app. Getting a short list in my inbox once a week works better than a list I have to remember to check. More on that in Get Your X (Twitter) and Bluesky Bookmarks in a Weekly Email.
What Birdfeeder doesn't replace
Birdfeeder only knows about posts you bookmark on X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr. It does not save web pages. If someone tweets a link to a blog post, Birdfeeder stores the tweet, including the link, but not the article behind it.
There's also no reader view, no offline reading of articles, no highlights, and no tags you apply from a browser. It can't import an old Pocket export file either. If you have a Pocket CSV from before the deadline, keep it somewhere safe, but it won't go into Birdfeeder.
For articles, a dedicated read-later app like Instapaper or Raindrop.io is the better fit. I use one for articles and Birdfeeder for social posts, and the two don't overlap much.
Which networks does it work with?
X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr. One Birdfeeder account can hold all four at once, so if you read Bluesky in the morning and X in the evening, everything ends up in the same place. I explained why I built it that way in One Bookmark Archive for X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr.
On Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr, Birdfeeder imports your whole bookmark history when you sign up. On X, it starts with your recent bookmarks, and the full backlog import is part of the yearly plan, because reading from X costs me money per request.
How much does it cost?
There's a 14-day free trial with no card. After that it's $5 a month or $45 a year. The details are on the pricing page.
If you are moving off Pocket and most of what you saved were posts from social networks, try it on the account you bookmark from the most and see if the weekly email is useful to you. That tells you more within a week than any feature list.