Ask HN: Does anybody still use bookmarking services?

417 points by joe8756438 ↗ HN
If not, do you collect web pages some other way?

478 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] thread
Isn't HN a bookmarking service?
Well you could use it that way by adding stuff to your favourites. A largely unused but useful feature of HN.
HN has a favorites feature?
For posts, it's in the list of button links under the post title at the top of the discussion page. For comments, you have to click the timestamp first.

Note that favourites are public and anyone can see what you added to your list. If you don't upvote spuriously, upvotes can also function as a private favourites list.

I totally didn't know/forgot that I can get a list of everything I upvoted from HN, but yeah, there it is on my profile! That could have saved me a lot of time in the past trying to figure out "what was that thing again I saw on HN last week?"
I do this sometimes. Enjoyable to read through it once in a while.
I literally posted my last post, so I can add it to my favourites on HN.
Brave browser has this built in --- easy access from multiple devices.
Does it allow you to share bookmarks or collections of bookmarks?
Yes, I share one set of bookmarks between a desktop, a laptop, a phone and a tablet.
I haven't thought about it in years... but is Delicious still a thing? I would think (hope?) there would be an open source, PHP-based project I could throw onto commodity hosting to collect and manage bookmarks. If this doesn't exist it should -- and I wonder how hard it would be to also integrate saving/sharing tab-sets as well.
What you're looking for is Shaarli => https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

There's a whole community of "shaarlist" in France, you can also fuse several shaarli in a "river"... Some rivers are my 2nd HckrNws when I want to read something.

Pinboard is still quite active. If you need proof just go to /recent which is a live firehose and interesting to see what people are bookmarking. I use Pinboard and regularly export my bookmarks incase their servers are hacked/wiped/corrupted.
As a paying customer, I would not recommend pinboard. Just look at some recent discussions on HN. It has been abandonware for years now.
Is it failing for you? Would you switch to some other alternative?
Part of it is definitely that Pinboard as a service (feels to be at least) is in "maintenance mode" with minimal support. But what new features does a bookmarking service need?

Part of it is also that tech bros are upset that Maciej didn't go full-coinbase and is instead pretty active socially/politically.

I'm happy to keep using it and paying for it. Works fine for my needs.

I am not a techbro (not from a tech field) and I don’t want new features, only that the ones it has not stop working. Especially when I am paying for it.
Exactly, I hate the idea that software has to be constantly updated. That's how we end up with so many bloated messes that started out simple (cough dropbox cough). Pinboard is simple, and for my needs at least, perfect. If he kept it in maintenance mode forever, I'd be fine with that.
Ah yes, this is why Hackernews is now abandonware. /s
HN has a full time maintainer @dang. And HN hasn’t started failing at its basic tasks like posting or commenting.
The comment you're replying to was sarcasm (note the /s).
I switched from Pinboard to Raindrop after not getting a response to pinboard support emails. I hope Pinboard’s creator is okay.
Probably busy tweeting
His last tweet is from December, declaring he’d spend a year off Twitter. He’s made it halfway so far!
he needed a year off twitter. he was fun to follow for a while, but it was sad to watch the tweets turn so angry and defensive.
Same for me. Got an answer to my support requests months later. I left long time ago (to Raindrop).
Paying customer ~4 years here (prior use for years). Happy with it. Use it for extensive private bookmarking.
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It has been abandonware for years now

I pay to keep the servers running, not so I can have something new and shiny every month. If it somehow quits doing what pinboard does, then I'll look at alternatives.

Paying customer. Really happy with it. None of the other options compare in terms of functionality and minimalism.
That actually reminds me I haven't done an export in a looong time and I should.

I was using Magnolia before Pinboard and it went down permanently. Fortunately, at the time, I was doing link blog posts once or twice a week so I was able to recover most of my links with a bit of work.

I like Pinboard and its creator but he has been leaving me with the impression that it is no longer a priority for him.
I use Pocket, then I have my own tool that exports my data from Pocket to SQLite: https://datasette.io/tools/pocket-to-sqlite
Awesome, I've been looking for something like this forever! I use Pocket a ton and make lots of highlights. But its search and archive features have been practically unusable for 3 years for me despite frequent complaints to support.
Bummer, though, since it looks like Pocket's API doesn't export the highlights or any metadata about them. Unless it's hidden in the "fts" or whatever that is.
I'm using raindrops across all my devices for curating links and tagging them.

It's a nice tool.

I use the notion web clipper, then tag in Notion.
Yes, but in combination with highlights and annotation (I use diigo.com). memex.garden is a similar offering, although I haven't used it myself.
Yup, I use a self hosted version of [1]

[1]: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

This is the one I'm leaning towards using as well. (Though https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori was a close second.)

Linkding uses SQLite as the database, which for self-hosting is such a huge win. It doesn't do much in the way of local archiving, but the interface looks so incredibly clean.

I haven't tried this yet, but since I have "HTTP Shortcuts" (wonderful Android app) already installed I really appreciated the ability to be able to send bookmarks from my phone easily without installing anything new:

https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding/blob/ebbf0022bc44bf...

Why give that link a number?
I’ve been using Raindrop.io for this. (Not affiliated.)
I use and love Pinboard, plus the Instapaper-like read-it-later integration Paperback (readpaperback.com) set as my home page in my mobile browser. It’s a great combo.
I use Pocket, and Alfread on top of that. Will switch out pocket for instapaper though, because Pocket cannot seem to download articles in the background, so when I'm reading on unreliable connections the articles are never there.
Just switched from https://pinboard.in to https://raindrop.io for this the other day. Migration went smoothly and so far the product is a bit nicer.
The suggested tags is what I'm really interested in, but don't want to pay extra for it. It'd be nice if a Chrome extension (since my bookmarks are sync'd there anyway) handled this with a nicer display but used the existing bookmarks.

For example, a tag of the subreddit would be excellent for all my recent /r/unixporn inspiration saves. Managing bookmarks is a hassle and why I usually don't bother or throw them into a "Misc" folder.

I have started doing something completely different than using bookmarks. I set up yacy[1] on a personal, internal server at my home, which I can access from all my devices, since they are always on my wireguard vpn.

Yacy is actually a distributed search engine, but I run in 'Robinson mode' as a private peer, to keep it isolated, as I just want a personal search of only sites I have indexed.

Anytime I come across something of interest, I index it with yacy, using a a depth of 0 (since I only want to index that one page, not the whole site). This way, I can just go to my search site, and search for something, and anything related that I've indexed before pops up. I found this works way better than trying to manage bookmarks with descriptions and tags.

Also, yacy will keep a cache of the content which is great if the site ever goes offline or changes.

If I need to browse, I can go use yacy's admin tools to see all the urls I have indexed.

I have been using this for several months and I am using this way more than I ever used my bookmarks.

[1] https://yacy.net/

That's amazing! I wanted to make something similar. Thank you!
I'd love something similar to automatically crawl and index every site I visit. I'm forever losing stuff. I know I saw it but I can't remember where.
This is Mac only and I have no affiliation other than I like this developer but your request reminded me that he just launched this app: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-history-book
That’s a really genius idea. I also like the author’s pricing mode. I was fearing some stupid “$10 is just the price of coffee. This is worth 24 coffees a year for the rest of your life” and have a reasonable $7 purchase price.
that's some expensive ass coffee considering i buy a bag for less than that and use it for a week or two, making tens of cups
You are not Starbucks’ market.
who the fuck is starbucks' market if a daily coffee costs over $2000 each year (assuming you do a 5-day workweek and throwing two months off the year to account for days when you don't get morning coffee from starbucks)

you have to be swimming in money

that makes me doubt that anyone would pay more than $2-4 and even that's overpriced as hell

I use Google for this. It's really annoyingly good at finding previously visited pages.
Can it cache indexed pages? If not how do you deal with disappearance/changes online?
Yes, it does automatically keep a cache from when it indexed the site. I have it set to not automatically recrawl sites, so the cache is from when I added the site.
This is great, and is something I've wanted for a while. I use pinboard which is supposed to have similar capabilities (click 'search full text', 'search mine' after turning on and paying for 'archiving'), but I've never been totally confident in it (pages would change, and the cached version was updated to a 404 page), and ended up letting my archiving subscription lapse.

I think google used to offer something that did this as well as search all your local files, but I think that went the way of all gThings.

There's also https://historio.us/ - it's essentially same as what OP is doing but it's as easy as bookmarking
That does look pretty cool, and unusually for a SaaS has chosen a pricing I think is reasonable for the service (not everything should be $9 a month!).

Do you know if it does pdfs? That's a key thing I want in this kind of service.

All of Stavros' stuff is reasonably priced and sexy.
That's a good one, but I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

> Google Desktop was a computer program with desktop search capabilities, created by Google for Linux, Apple Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows systems. It allowed text searches of a user's email messages, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and the ability to display "Google Gadgets" on the user's desktop in a Sidebar.

Discontinued in September 2011

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Google desktop was so great. It’s also weird how bad windows search and Mac search sucks.

Google desktop was able to find files anywhere in milliseconds. Still today if I search for a file on windows it takes many seconds and frequently misses the file. And there’s an indexing service that seems to peg my cpu every once in a while.

You want Everything. I've been using it for probably close to 10 years now, it makes searching on Windows not just bearable, but capable.
Nice! I’ve been working on and off on a similar idea (searchable index of link contents) as a cli app eventually web web frontend. It’s on Python so packaging has been an issue.
If anybody is interested in this, there is also a service which offers very similar thing: https://historio.us/
That's mine! Feel free to drop a line if you need anything.
"i like historious" as the only review at the bottom gave me a laugh for some reason
I have 3 tech related subscriptions; BorgBase, JetBrains, and historio.us. I self-host everything, but I've never found anything that replaces historio.us. It indexes just enough to always get me a complete copy of the data I want cached and the search results are just right. I often have about 1 page of search results when I'm looking for old info and I can pick out the page I'm looking for instantly.

I use it a lot when I'm learning something new. As I'm looking for beginner info I'll often find more advanced stuff that I'd like to try or learn at some point, but I don't have a good enough understanding to know if it's truly useful info. I historify those sites and move on knowing that I can find it in my historio.us search at a later date.

I also reference cached pages in a lot of my personal docs. I recently started using ArchiveBox for that, but the search doesn't make it a good replacement for the above use case.

I've been using historio.us since 2011 (!) and have never found anything to replace it. Great job!

Thanks, I'm glad you like it! I really should give it some love, but I'd need to do a fairly sizable rewrite for most stuff...
product looks very promising!

Some UI feedback: I went to check out https://historio.us/ and on my macbook air I saw the top of the green button "see our plans". Took me a couple of clicks until I realized I had to scroll down to click the real "plans and pricing" button that was off my screen.

Ahh, thanks! The same link is at the top, but I'll see if I can reposition.
Nice! How about getting it to automatically index your whole search history?

Not what you're going for -- you don't have a list of specifically opted-in 'bookmarks' to browse.

but I have often wanted "wait, what was that site involving X I was looking at maybe last week?"

It would also be nice to be able to search through my aggregated browsing history on every device I use.

Maybe I should open a feature request to Google/Fracebook to provide an API hook for that, since they probably already have all that information anyway.

This. I wonder if there is a way to direct my searches first to the domains I have ever visited. Oftentimes I will search for something that I am sure I’ve hit before but can vaguely remember which result set it was that scored my search.
Yes works, you just need to use the proxy function of yacy, and everything get s indexed.
Facebook doesn't share data out in APIs!
My chrome history appears to aggregate my browsing across devices Anyways, so it should just be a matter of exposing that info
Firefox probably does too, if you're logged in.
A bit different, but I've been building something similar that runs locally: https://github.com/a5huynh/spyglass

You create some rules for topics you want to index and it'll go out and crawl them. Searching through it is a global hotkey away.

Spyglass looks amazing! Thank you for this.
Thank you! Feel free to ping me on Github/Discord if you run into any issues, always looking to make it better :)
This is fascinating! I've been meaning to set something up on a spare rpi for this and I hadn't heard of yacy before. Thanks!
Thanks this look neat. Can you easily share index accros clients?

Edit : looks like the docker config allow to mount a arbitrary folder , that folder can be shared. I don’t need it to be concurrent proof.

Again, thanks this look nice.

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This is how I always imagined the search engines of the future to work. All the data is local first and the user is in control.
me too, when I first used delicious I was hoping that individual curators could provide a more in-depth "meta search" engine! Pocket is not bad, it provides some interesting links to new stuff on the web.
How does yacy handle paywalls? Does it use the cookies from your browser instance or can it use bypass services like 12ft and co?
Ive never even considered something like this before, but its genius!

The offline caching sounds awesome.

Thanks for sharing

Nice

I have wished for a while that browser would store the entire page of any bookmark you save automatically, and put a decent search engine on it. I wrote a script once to do it for my bookmarks, and it didn't even take that much space on my hard drive.

Your system could be a Firefox addon, kinda like what scrapbook used to be, but automatic. Even with a note system, and storing metadata, Zotero style, but without the need for the dual setup.

How mozzilla is not pursuing that kind of innovation in Firefox itself is beyond me. Instead they continously try to ape the Chrome UI and collect telemetry without permission so that they can give you "exciting" "new" features like colorways.
What a good idea. A search engine like Kagi could support importing your existing bookmarks as a custom lense.
That's an awesome idea. I'll have to look into this. Been looking for something like this.
How does the process of bookmarking goes then? meaning, how hard is it to add something to crawl with depth0 on a day to day. Can it be done with a bookmarklet?
That sounds really cool. How difficult is this to set up?

How confident are you that this will keep your bookmarks safe? Losing indexed data might not be such a big concern for a search engine that is intended to re-index everything continuously.

I defnitely felt betrayed when I found out that Firefox automatically deletes old history :/ I guess they think that most users need to trash their profile to fix some obscure bug before that anyway...

I'd love to hear more about how you set all this up, particularly, do you have some sort of extension or bookmarklet that submits the current page to yacy's crawler?
This is insane! Thanks for recommendation! Was able to set it up relatively quickly and now have a personal search of all the things that I find interesting, this is insane!
Thanks for this recommendation! Do you only index things with a depth of 0? I just set Yacy up a couple days after seeing this post, and didn't realize what that meant at first.

Now I have 10s of 1000s of pages indexed after importing my bookmarks/history, and I'm wondering if it'd be more useful to _only_ index the pages I've visited/bookmarked, or if it'd also be good to crawl those sites further.

I guess one distinction would be whether or not I thought I could use Yacy as a full-time replacement for google/ddg. It'd be nice if I could index "everything", but then have a toggle to search only my bookmarks/history or something similar to that.

I really liked this setup. The only point of friction for me was adding the links to the index via the crawler everytime. So I created a Firefox Extenstion to do it directly from the address-bar.

If someone is interested, you can download it from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yacy-it/

Limitation: It currently supports only YaCy running on localhost and unprotected. You might have to configure CORS as outlined here -> https://github.com/tecoholic/yacy-it#configuring-yacy

I pay for Pinboard with archiving, in fact my 5 year archiving was about to expire to paid for 10 years.

The entropy of links is staggering. I'm glad to have archives of some of the oldest links.

After I reached around 7-8k bookmarks the only thing that worked for me is an orgmode text file in a git repo, but it's true that I don't need fancy syncing or sharing/social features.
I realized that I never go back to my bookmarks and if I really wanted to find something again I usually am able to. I came to the same realization with hoarding movies / tv shows.
The only bookmarks I use are to particular pages on particular systems that I need to reference relatively often and navigating to them is annoying.

Otherwise, my bookmarks are the history in the browser - "ne" is hacker news, "yo" is YouTube, etc.

This is the state I am rapidly approaching. Outside of Toolbar quick access stuff I find I always search or it pops up in history suggestions before I search
This is great until you need to reinstall the OS/browser and suddenly everything you typed in the omnibar is gone.
yeah but I also feel like the occasional purge isn't the worst thing
I've also come to this realization. It was one of the more freeing realizations I've had, along with "I don't have to save every email I've ever received for all time".

The weight off my mind from skipping the maintenance, care, and feeding of various digital libraries is considerable, and I recommend it to stressed out friends & family.

As a counterpoint, I don't go to my bookmarks often, but when I do, it's invaluable, and I'd feel lost without them.

Especially with tags, I can quickly find a number of things I find/found interesting just by using one or two tags.

I agree about hoarding media, though. But I still like to have metadata on content I want to watch, and content I've watched and what I thought about it.

Yes, I wrote my own service after Maciej (very politely, this is not a criticism!) asked grandfathered-in single-payment Pinboard users if they would consider a recurring payment. It's a simple Python / Flask app which runs on a host running Dokku.