Recently I found myself looking for a place to store bookmarks. I used to love del.icio.us, but it's no longer around. What is its spiritual successor? I'm currently trying Pocket, which seems to be alright, but I wonder if there is anything else this community can recommend. The most important things for me would be integration with browsers, maybe a dedicated app, and mobile / desktop support.
Readit News
The flagship instance is: https://ln.ht
The source code is hosted here: https://sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut/
The documentation: https://docs.linkhut.org/introduction.html
The one thing that I’m working on before releasing 1.0 is taking a snapshot at time of bookmark and index its contents to make it searchable (similar to pinboard’s feature).
Obviously there’s a big chicken and egg problem with any social network like that, but I suppose what I’m getting at is I wouldn’t be afraid to “fake it” when you’re first starting out. Maybe scrape links from Reddit, HN, or even an old cache of StumbleUpon?
- make sure that the data ingested in such a way is tagged in such a way that it is obvious it isn’t organic
- wait until I get a few more features that I really care about implemented (at the very least the archival and indexing of the page bookmarked)
But yeah, I agree that - for me - a huge part of the appeal of using delicious was to see the tags the community had already applied to a bookmark I would submit, and with only a handful of users at the moment we’re nowhere near having that experience :)
To me, Search is the number 1 need. And would be cool if an extension that added a button to bookmark pages visited could also introspect every page I visit to look through old bookmarks & show a count in a separate button to view similar related pages I've already visited.
[1] https://github.com/jarun/buku
There's the potential of discoverability and seeing what other people recommend that can't really be done with offline bookmarking. In one sense because there's no company (other than pinboard?) that does "social bookmarking" maybe that means it's not a very large niche? Did places like delicio.us and pinboard succeed just because of the convenience of having a managed bookmark site?
I know it's not very popular, but there is the possibility of a 'persistent' bookmark service through some combination of web3/blockchain/ipfs/nft. This would solve the persistence problem but I wonder if the premise that social bookmarking is valuable is flawed to begin with.
BUT, this seems like a perfect fediverse offering. Decentralized, self-hosted (or not) software that all talks to other instances to create a sharing ecosystem for people who want it. Based on what other fediverse projects are doing, you could likely even share certain tags only with a certain scope. If there's demand for it, it seems like this would be a no-brainer.
https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase
1. 100% offline, no network requests will be sent. (The downside is that I don't know how many users I have
2. self-deploying. Provides docker image, compressed javascript source code (no binary).
3. open source API documentation and SDK
4. currently free, no restrictions.
5. support full-text serach and highlight webpages.
6. desktop and P2P synchronization in development
10 years later, this project will still available.
- LinkAce (https://www.linkace.org)
- Linkding (https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding)
- Wallabag (https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag)
- Buku (https://github.com/jarun/Buku)
- Linkwarden (https://github.com/Daniel31x13/link-warden)
It wasn't about hoarding personal data and keeping it secret. It was about sharing it publicly, like Twitter, and people following each other based on either personal connection or just a shared interest graph.
- Shiori (https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori)
- archivebox (https://archivebox.io/)
I add everything into one single bookmark folder in Firefox and slap on a few tags. Syncing between devices works perfectly. Adding a star (*) to the address bar limits the search to bookmarks only, which makes it insanely fast to look up interesting stuff I have bookmarked but vaguely remember, by typing one or two keywords. It makes it easy to look up things on my phone too, when out with friends and I need reference a project, article or whatever.
It has become the second brain I always wanted but never managed to maintain with more complex tools and services.
I did not know this, this will make searching through hundreds of bookmarks so much easier!
These changes has made my address bar instant to use with no clutter at all. Usually I find exactly what I'm looking for in less than a second, be it an often used URL or a far forgotten bookmark. In my opinion, this is the core functionality of a browser address bar. The current defaults has turned the address bar into the main interface for big search engines (with a capital G), which happily gobbles up all the data users send their way.
For your use case, however, I recommend also getting into Hypothesis. I always used browser-based bookmarks (and still do), but I've gotten a ton of utility out of Hypothesis since I began using it. It's weird, because I came at it slowly, having known about Hypothesis for a long time—my initial impression being, "yeah, okay, kind of neat or whatever", followed by not touching it for years.
The problem with browser-based bookmarks is that you're limited to the title* and URL for recall, plus your own tags. With Hypothesis, however, you can quote from the page in question, marking up specific passages, and then also add your own comments about it (plus tags). This is in fact really the only way that I use Hypothesis—when I feel like scribbling something in the margins. This, however, in a way ends up emerging as a replacement for much of my bookmarks-for-recall use, too, even though it's never really the point. Because the storage model includes the contents of the quoted passage and the text of your own annotation, this additionally grants you, in a limited way, the ability to do partial text search across the contents of the collected pages. As a result, I end up using Hypothesis far more often to relocate something than I do with the bookmarks manager nowadays.
It would be great if this functionality became standard for all browsers (and it might still; folks on the Chrome team have suggested they're serious about adding annotations to the browser in some form). With Mozilla deciding that selling premium plans to a commercial, closed-source SaaS is in their financial interest, however, it seems virtually guaranteed that Firefox's built-in bookmarks will remain deliberately limited for the lifetime of Firefox as a product, in order to funnel people towards Pocket, unless/until Chrome does something to make them feel pressured to change.
* NB: you can technically override the name, I guess, but I've never done that and always let it default to the title. Firefox used to have an additional description/comment field, but this got removed from the UI. I suspect it was rarely used. I can't say I did anything with it more than a handful of times. Hypothesis's UI for actually resolving (i.e. highlighting) the fuzzy anchors really does alter my behavior a lot towards this direction.
For me, the simplicity offered by the built-in bookmark system in Firefox is what makes me use it regularly. The moment I decide I have found an URL I might want to look up later, I hit ctrl + d, add a few quick tags, close the site and move on. It takes me less than 10 seconds and has lowered the bar significantly for adding a bookmark. No cognitive overhead is incurred by choosing an existing folder from a (deep) hierarchy, or trying to come up with yet another category in a sub-folder somewhere.
That said, I might move on to a self-hosted bookmark solution in the future that adds the the option to locally archive a webpage, but until then I'll keep doing what I'm doing, because it really works for me :)
Dead Comment
One of its nicest features is that it can function as a mini-browser. For example, let's say you're working on a project where you need to have a lot of different sites open for documentation, guides, references and so on. Instead of opening them as tabs in a browser, you can bookmark them in Raindrop and then use Raindrop as the browser.
It's not bad, but I haven't used it for long. I like that it finds dupes and has thumbnails like a news reader. I used yt-download to extract my YouTube favorites and playlists video urls into a .csv file and loaded those in as well, and it did the right thing. So we'll see.
[1]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1476079701978345472
Err... To just say he said he was "taking the year[...] off" has an entirely different connotation. The tweet says that he decided to step away from Twitter. Those comments don't explain the lack of activity on Pinboard. He in fact specifically mentions getting other things done and links to Pinboard.
Glad he’s taking some time away from it.
Even the Pinboard blog URL [0]he linked to in his leaving Twitter tweet[1]is showing the Apache Default page to me.
I know there are a couple of good mobile apps for Pinboard but I’d much prefer just being able to use the site on mobile
[0] http://blog.pinboard.in/ [1] https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1476079701978345472?s=20...
When's the last time you tried that? Sometime in the past year ish (can't remember exact dates), it got updated to scale properly on narrow screens, and I've had no problem using it on mobile since then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628375#30657065
idlewords: "Archiving (mis)behavior depends on what machine your account is assigned to"
Deleted Comment
I have been using it for the past 15 years with great satisfaction.