Brian Lovin
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Hacker News

Ask HN: What Happened to Outline.com?

www outline.com is offline/unreachable since about 10 days. It is/was(?) a very useful service to make some webpages more readable and (in some case) avoid the paywall. I also used it a lot of time to extract the "reader view" of some article to send it via email. But since 7-10 the website is down but domain looks okay. I'm also using a recursive DNS resolver so it's not blocked via DNS from my ISP.

Someone know what's going on? I haven't found other info.

Thanks

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Zondor3000

If you want to save a clean copy of a webpage, https://www.printfriendly.com/ works nicely, but some URLs are not supported. But sometimes, you can use https://tinyurl.com/ to create an spoof link which will process. Another good one is: https://pdf.fivefilters.org/ And of course, you should be reading the news with Firefox browser, so you can invoke the "Reader View" feature (very easy). This Firefox solution is the best, easiest fix to replace outline.com https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

ChrisArchitect

The OP is a question about what happened not looking for the hundred alternatives and add-ons there are out there. What happened?

schnebbau

They probably got rekt by legal takedowns.

atoav

So... HTTP 451 Unavailable for Legal reasons

ausudhz

I've noticed that when it was still active was not working with some website at some point (eg. Financial time, new York times etc)

Probably was a tentative to fix thing before was too late (and eventually closed completely)

giuliomagnifico

:( it was my suspect but since I can’t find any confirmation, I’m not sure of this.

frontman1988

12ft.io works

giuliomagnifico

Yes, I know but it doesn’t work on all the websites. I’m not asking for an alternative, I know a lot of alternatives, I’m just curious to know what happened to outline.com =)

i67vw3

Can you list the alternatives you know?

So, I could check them later on.

dewey

It's a high value domain, maybe they sold it and it's in the process of being transferred?

moralestapia

5 figures? 6 figures?

peapicker

Archive.is (etc) did it better?

giuliomagnifico

Archive.is is a different service, it’s indispensable but it saves the page for the future, outline.com is/was only making the article more readable by extracting only the text, and it doesn’t save anything offline, it’s also way more fast than archive.is. It is/was something like an Instapaper whiteout the login.

peapicker

In effect tho, using reader mode in the browser on archive.[a-z]* is about the same as outline.

mds101

The problem is some brilliant product manager decided that the reader mode button should not be available on all websites and should only be available on those it seems to be articles.

cheeze

Damn, I don't actually care about the paywalling, I just really liked their reader view.

I've been using Firefox. Reader view is decent.

bredren

Do you have any screenshots of the reader view?

Rastonbury

What do you use now, Chrome? If so, I strongly suggest just try Firefox, cares more about privacy, no constantly pushing to link your browser to an account, addons like multi-containers, built in fingerprint resistance (experimental).

bredren

I use FF for my daily driver. I misread and thought you were describing a reader view of this service.

tartoran

RIP, it did a pretty good job at keeping reading distraction free. Hope it will make a comeback one day

reddon1000

I would pay for this service. I follow articles all over the place, and it would be crazy to subscribe to each source as if I'm a specialist in that field. But I recognize that content was not created at no cost, and it's fair to pay something for it.

kilroy123

What I do is use "_Bypass Paywalls Clean_" for Firefox, on my desktop. [1]

Then on my iPhone (safari), I use a handy little iOS shortcut that routes the page to archive.is and then shows the reader mode version. [2]

I used to use a cool shortcut for apple news that would also parse the URL, find the original article, and show it reader mode. Sadly, apple disabled sharing of News+ articles.

[1] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

[2] https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/81c670b532e340e38a35cc62e3e...

croutonwagon

That iCloud shortcut was great. Took a bit of fiddling to get it to work. And I often have to be the first to cache a page from my RSS reader, miniflux, it’s still pretty great and definitely a huge quality of life improvement. Thanks a bunch!

evanreichard

Hey! That shortcut gave me an idea. I just wrote a quick UserScript that will basically do the same, only completely automatically [0]. Maybe I'll add something that will popup and ask if you want to be redirected.

[0] https://gist.github.com/evanreichard/83467a4775f1672756140fc...

dserodio

The domain does not look okay. There are no A or CNAME records, only NS (AWS) and MX (Google) records

amelius

How would one build such a service in a way that is resilient against legal takedowns?

undefined

[deleted]

dsr_

Make it a browser extension.

amelius

I don't like browser extensions because of the security model.

Also, it has to get its data from somewhere, and this source can still be taken down, I suppose.

Perhaps you can hash the original url, use that as a key and upload the ascii text of the article as a torrent.

dsr_

Why would it need to get data from anything except the page you are looking at?

2ICofafireteam

For western takedowns, until recently, host it in Russia?

funerr

Open sourcing it?

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Ask HN: What Happened to Outline.com? - Hacker News