I made a opensource alternative for these services. Although these worked very well, I was not so confident what they do. So I made my own and opensourced it.

It is written in Golang and is fully customizable.

Smort lets you easily edit, annotate and share an article. To read any article, just prepend smort.io/ before a URL in a browser. (I recently found out that even 12ft.io/ uses the same technique). Smort is free to use and shareable links are valid for 7 days from creation. Permanent links will be supported soon.

I'm primarily a backend/ML engineer so had to learn all things frontend to build Smort. I started out developing in SvelteKit and loved it but later migrated to React & Nextjs due to better third party library support. I have lots of ideas on how to take Smort forward and would love for you all to use it. Please join our Discord to share your curated articles and feedback!

This is a walkthrough article detailing everything Smort can do at the moment - https://smort.io/demo-walkthrough.

Smort's name was inspired by the memes [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=smort+meme&tbm=isch

Medium is one example. They have GREAT SEO, they're always in the first 5 results, but when you open the post is always behind the paywall.

I could use something like 12ft.io, but that's not the point. What surprises me is that Google is serving ME a pretty bad result, and they don't know/care.

And honestly besides the awful ultra-targeted advertising based on biological reactions etc... it seems actually pretty freaking cool.

Do you think we'll be able to create adblockers for these devices in the future?

For now Occulus is based on android and is pretty hackable, but IYO how will that change if Meta make their own OS?