Back in August of 2016, Pinterest acquired Instapaper, the read-it-later bookmarking service originally built by Marco Arment.
Just shy of two years later, Instapaper is going back to being independent.
In a blog post published this afternoon, the team clarifies that a new company called “Instant Paper, Inc.” has been formed to oversee Instapaper, and that it’ll largely be made up of the same folks who’ve worked on it since ~2013.
Don’t expect much to change, for better or worse — at least, not immediately. The company is waiting three weeks before officially transferring ownership, in order to “give [its] users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.”
The team doesn’t outline the reasoning for splitting away, but it has many users hoping its newly regained independence means it can become GDPR-compliant sooner than later. Instapaper shut off its services in Europe back in May so they could “make changes in light of [GDPR]”; two months later, the service remains offline in the EU.
Instapaper confirmed this afternoon that GDPR-compliance is still a goal: