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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.
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.
I'm with you that, in theory, I see a value proposition there but in practice it's pretty thin. I remember using delicio.us to find out some interesting links based on some interesting peoples account, but it was very limited and I obviously haven't used that feature in years since delicio.us shut down.
So the "share" feature is useful, but not useful enough to warrant either a centralized entity to make enough money to keep the lights on or create decentralized version for the community?
I have a home-grown note taking/link saving facility that just so happens to be public facing because it's easier for me to keep it public than to worry about logins and such but the audience is very clearly focused on one individual, me.
I do wonder if there are other people that would actually use this type of service for it's community/sharing potential. Is there something adjacent that adds value?
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.
that said, i always wanted to split delicious up into "islands" of ~50k users or so, and allow each island determine it's own local rules. and if you didn't like your island, you could go elsewhere. yahoo wouldn't entertain this idea at the time.... this was before subreddits happened but the success of subreddits suggests to me that i was directionally correct
That was one of the biggest things I got out of Delicious… basically Reddit without the comments.
- 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 :)
I think the key is not trying to use it to replace bookmarks. That takes deliberate work and commitment.
I began using Hypothesis to write "replies" where the comment mechanism was non-existent/unreliable/cumbersome (e.g. on very old content or HN threads, or blogs where the author is likely to not tolerate dissenting opinions, or forums where I don't already have an account, etc.), or instances where I couldn't resist jotting down a response that I had no intention of actually posting publicly (because e.g. being heavy on snark). Eventually you gradually build up a personalized data source that is richer than just the bookmark tagging system (and also includes pages things that you would never think to bookmark deliberately but have later discover some need to revisit it despite that—ever fished something out of your past without having bookmarked it, but were able to relocate it years later because you could recall something about an HN thread that you participated in?). I continue using bookmarks and tags—which, like you, I treat it as as close to a zero-friction act as possible rather than meticulously filing it away in a hierarchy. Using Hypothesis, though, is a supplement to ordinary bookmark usage—an additional resource.
> I might move on to a self-hosted bookmark solution in the future that adds the the option to locally archive a webpage
I recommend using Zotero to capture snapshots but otherwise continuing to use browser-based bookmarks. My relationship with Zotero is similar to Hypothesis—having known about it for years, I only started using it recently (ca. 2020). But it's great. I should've been using it all along.
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.
There's a very good talk by Moxie "the ecosystem is moving"[1][2] and the reason you need your software to be changing constantly, even when it's doing one thing well, is because all other software is changing, moving requirements, compatibility, and integrations.
Also, it's not like we have no progress in UX. I quite like the light/dark theme in apps changing according to the time of day. It only really started working well within the last two years after all apps adapted.
[1] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8
> a product that serves a relatively simple and clear-cut need like a bookmark stash
By the same reductionist logic, you could argue that people don't need a bookmarking service at all, they can just save bookmarks in a text file. Simple, clear-cut. No fuss.
[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://ibb.co/jZgzQnF
[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/pins-for-pinboard/id1547106997
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=30628375#30657065
idlewords: "Archiving (mis)behavior depends on what machine your account is assigned to"
I have been using it for the past 15 years with great satisfaction.
https://www.wallabag.it/
I had the realization that the impulse to collect a bookmark is similar to the impulse to collect all kinds of things: notes, transactions, images, formulas, events, etc. Tap is a collection of building blocks to collect, organize and put this information to use.
0. https://tatatap.com 1. https://tatatap.com/bookmarks
i use apple notes for links plus text for projects that have a short completion cycle (find a bunch of stuff, make an analysis and decision, jettison the research)
(this is relevant only because i wrote del.icio.us originally)
App Store link: <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodlinks/id1474335294>
Not related to the developer, just a happy user.
Several years ago I wrote my own spiritual successor. It’s called Curabase.
It has been posted on HN before. If there’s enough interest I will renew development efforts on it.
I’ve been looking for a side hustle again
http://tentacle.rupy.se
It's less simple than Delicious used to be, but it scratched the itch for a while for me. I barely ever bookmark anything these days. When Delicious was sold I stopped using it, and realised I didn't miss bookmarking and hardly ever read any of my bookmarks anyway. Excessive bookmarking seems like FOMO to me, I try to avoid it and embrace a more Zen-like attitude :)
I find myself using markdown files these days to store my links. That way I can also store context around the links by writing stuff around the links. This sounds foolish, but it does in fact check all your boxes:
- You can publish this markdown file on GitHub pages so it has integration with browsers
- People can follow you using RSS (yes, people still do this, myself included)
- I use Epsilon Notes and FolderSync Pro on my Android device to sync the markdown files over Dropbox so there's mobile app support
- Portable across time because it's just text
- Widely supported by different tools
This is actually also my note-taking system. I have shortcuts in them that allow me to take screenshots and store them next to the markdown and link to them. I store links by simply making a link in the markdown file of the paragraph I'm working on.
I dislike Facebook as much as the next person, but this is just straight up disinformation.
GDPR's fault?
It goes way beyond being a passive store of links. For example, if you save a bunch of AirBnB links, it automatically creates a comparison table for you: https://histre.com/public/collections/35s2o5wz/mexico-city-a...
re Hacker News integration: https://histre.com/features/share-hackernews-upvotes/ I publish my upvoted stories here: https://histre.com/collections/o34gelgt/kirubakarans-hacker-...
Disclaimer: I work on Histre.
Tough crowd!
I wouldn't normally post a simple "me too" or "+1" but, in this case, the original poster was asking for a recommendation. So I think, in these circumstances, it's justified [and less messy] to give a 'me too' to a suggestion you agree with, rather than [as many others have done] post a separate reply, recommending the same site.
Yeah, we definitely don't want any noise here.Scrolls though dozens of repeat submissions of the same story every day, hundreds of submissions of tweets as news stories, endless spammy posts for 'keto gummies' and the regular moronic opinions of Evon-fucking-Latrail [whoever the fuck he is!]
If it is sharing of links, use Twitter or whatever social network you use. My main issues with those is that they don't tend to have good history/search if you want to dig out a link you shared months ago. I find finding back what I remember sharing or what I saw other share a bit of a challenge with social networks. This was what del.ico.us was good at. Also nice was getting a sense of how popular things were from how many people bookmarked a certain thing.
If it is just storing bookmarks, use the browser sync in your browser. I have my bookmarks synced across my devices with Firefox. But I don't use bookmarks that often.
I never had much use for things like pocket. At least, I either click on something and read it right away or I don't. I don't really save things for reading them later. Just not part of how I do things. But I guess if I would, bookmarks are fine for that as well.
I’m thinking of adding user profiles to be able to follow people and see what they’re reading and noting too.
I’m not sure if it’s entirely a spiritual successor as I’m too young to have used del.icio.us sadly.
Ironic that a bookmarking website ran on a domain I had to bookmark, coz I could never remember it.
but i am glad you found the opportunity to do the nerdiest seinfeld impression.
https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
BotMark: A Telegram bot for quick bookmarking & powerful search (works in groups as well)
For Individuals: When you find an interesting website/article on your mobile phone, press the share button and select "botmark"—nothing more, nothing less.
For Groups: Add "botmark" to a group and keep track of all the links in your group in one place—easy peasy.
distinguishing features: selfhosted, in-browser-snapshots-as-currently-rendered for archival and against linkrot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT0u-iUxUWk
I think this is a problem crying out for a better solution though. Searchable local history with summarization and classification that respects incognito mode with good batch nuking capability.
I mean, Pocket is great, one of the reasons I like Kobo readers is Pocket integration, and I prefer to read the articles in Pocket interface instead of the original.
But for things like YouTube videos, or comments in forums, etc., Pocket is not the best place to store these URLs long term.
Very handy way of using your daily links such as - o/roadmap - o/allhands - o/issue/{search}
Why does this not exist in a general form for bookmarks? I want to bookmark articles and apps and then see how they rank and if I could read a better article about the topic or use a better app.
> On June 1, 2017, Delicious was acquired by Pinboard, and the bookmarking service was discontinued in favor of Pinboard's paid subscription-based service.
Pinboard is a bit of a HN darling, so I think you can expect a lot of recommendations for them :)
Not a single app, but works for me (so far).
It’s not a website but a native app for macOS and iOS. But the fact that it’s not a website allows many deep integrations with macOS.
https://anybox.app
Side note: Mozilla, consider a paid subscription tier!
Sadly, they will probably sink that money in some unrelated side adventure that gets shut down 6 month down the line, while other services rot.
1. Save my bookmark in the blockchain via an ID (hash maybe) that is stored in a "bookmarks" smart contract 2. Use said ID to identify the bookmark in an IPFS file containing the whole bookmark data.
That way, the bookmark will live perpetually in the blockchain, and there are incentives for third unknown (to me) third parties to maintain the blockchain and its data. I still have to either pay Piñata or have my file pinned in IPFS.
- Why not an open export standard that you backup regularly either manually or via an API to a third-party cloud storage provider?
Right, because all those cases require me to "regularly" do something manually
- Why does it need to live in the cloud? Why not your own server or local device?
Because I want to be able to access it from multiple locations? And I don't want to risk losing them again if my local server breaks or whatnot... I also don't want to maintain a local server.
- There isn't one valid usage scenario for blockchain that actually makes sense versus existing solutions.
I am OK if you do not find it useful. I am sorry my proposal caused so much pain to you. I can sense in your angry reply that you got frustrated by my comment. For that I apologize. I'll keep thinking of interesting use cases for the Blockchain, hopefully that doesn't give you headaches :). All the best!
I live in the UK, I've got a lot more to be angry about than an HN comment, and if I'm in pain, it's because I've got Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
FYI, blockchain is a terrible idea for bookmarks because it is immutable. If someone does figure out decrypting it, that's a lot of potentially very compromising information in the public domain, especially on bookmarks that include your username and additional info in their title or description.
Nothing seems to do that.
I could use one for RadioUserland and another for CityDesk