Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

223 points by tunnuz ↗ HN
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.

174 comments

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pinboard.in

  >pinboard.in
This ^^
Wow! --three downvotes, just for recommending pinboard.

Tough crowd!

It's most likely not because you recommend Pinboard, but because you added a non-substantial comment when a click on the "upvote" button would have been sufficient.

  >because you added a non-substantial comment when a click on the "upvote" button would have been sufficient.
I did click on the upvote button. But, since no-one else, apart from the original commenter, can see how many upvotes his/her comment gets, how does that help back up someone's suggestion?

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.

  >...it makes for boring discussion and just adds noise.
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!]

> how does that help back up someone's suggestion?

The comment will be higher up on the comments page.

More noise, then. Don't add more noise.

Just because there's a dog turd on my front lawn, it doesn't mean everyone should start dumping all the dog turds on my front lawn.

I didn’t downvote you, but I can understand people downvoting comments that are unsubstantive. It’s typically not accepted here to complain about being downvoted either. As per the guidelines, it makes for boring discussion and just adds noise.
Probably more for the superfluous 'this' comment.
Pinboard was nice and simple once, but nowadays doesn't seem to be maintained and is broken in many ways. I've been trying to export my archive backup for almost a year without success.
It feels more "complete" than "unmaintained" to me. It's pretty basic in what it does, but it does that well. I haven't noticed any bugs as such - what did you find that's actually broken?
The tweet search function has been broken for a few years (yes I reported it).
I am a long-time user and archiving broke on my account at least half a year ago. Despite two support emails I did not get any replies. Feels quite "unmaintained" to me.
I love Pinboard. Haven’t used browser bookmarks in years.
pinboard.in but Maciej appears to be offline (?) at the moment and archiving is a bit broken (for me). Hope he's OK.
Maciej announced on twitter that he would be taking the year 2022 off [1]. I have not had any issues with pinboard but I also only use it occasionally.

[1]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1476079701978345472

Yep but also no response via the Pinboard support email.
Yes, he spent the last couple of years getting involved in the US election and clearly burned himself out on that.
Twitter really did a number on this guy over the past few years.

Glad he’s taking some time away from it.

I wouldn't minimize his work as "twitter" — he spent a lot of time, money, and effort on raising money (millions) for various downballot candidates over multiple elections only to ultimately find that it didn't have much impact. That's a bit crushing, and the kind of thing that takes some time to digest. I was a bit flummoxed myself and I had much less skin in the game.
> Maciej announced on twitter that he would be taking the year 2022 off

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.

He’s just taking a year off Twitter
Pinboard is nice, I got a year subscription on a whim and don't use it. It is too much friction to use, not sure why. Even after installing a browser extension, it is just easier to drag the link in the bookmarks bar than to pin it on pinboard.
(comment deleted)
I really like Pinboard and Maciej but Pinboard feels forgotten.

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...

> I’d much prefer just being able to use the site on mobile

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.

I agree. I was using Pinboard for a long time but with the pricing changes and lack of support, I switched to self-hosting LinkAce (https://www.linkace.org).
I second raindrop. It’s not quite perfect, but it’s really good, very affordable, and new features are released regularly.
Off-topic question-observation: I've been wondering lately why "new features are released regularly" is generally considered a boon when talking about software and specifically in a product that serves a relatively simple and clear-cut need like a bookmark stash. My TV does one job: it shows pictures really fast on a grid of pixels. Sure it's nice that, hardware permitting, support can be added for new media layer video protocols over time (the marvel of software), but I don't need it to be getting entirely new features to be happy. It's kinda nice that it just sits there and does its job. It does it so well that I keep coming back to the brand for new models as needed.
Perhaps it's to further justify the subscription pricing model. Not that I have much of a problem with it in this instance.
> I've been wondering lately why "new features are released regularly" is generally considered a boon when talking about software and specifically in a product that serves a relatively simple and clear-cut need like a bookmark stash

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

I agree with your general point, but I don't think it's applicable here really. Raindrop targets users who aren't looking for "a relatively simple and clear-cut... bookmark stash". That's part of what it offers, but the actual value over a myriad of other tools is in the broader feature set, like web page highlights, uploading files and treating them as bookmarks, automatic bookmarking from other web services (e.g., auto bookmarking Twitter favorites), etc. There's still a ways to go for the service without departing from the core vision. For example, one of the more popular user requests seems to be for bookmarked PDFs to have the same highlighting options as bookmarked web pages.
Since I started using Raindrop, the developer has added features like permanent snapshots of pages you save, the ability to highlight things on webpages, automatic daily backups, tag autocompletion, and has made significant improvements to the Safari extension and iOS app. I find a lot of the new features useful, as I'm sure most users do. If I wanted a simple bookmarking service, I would use one (or more likely make my own).

> 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.

What issues do you have with Raindrop?
Raindrop is great. I have been using it for a few months and it is well worth it. They also have good integrations and are adding more. I use it with NewsBlur quite a lot.
Raindrop looks amazing. Wish it weren't based in Russia.
I once emailed my concerns to them and they replied they are actually based in Kazakhstan since a few years, while their servers are all on AWS.
I just started using this because my iPhone refuses to sync Chrome Bookmarks and decided I needed another solution.

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.

Raindrop is good, but I had problems exporting my bookmarks. I clicked 'export' and the email with the download link didn't arrive. Contacted support and heard nothing back from them. Got the impression someone's asleep at the wheel after that, so I deleted my account.
Raindrop is superb. One of my favorite "tiny apps". It just works.

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.

I am curious how you do that exactly, could you please elaborate?
I'm referring to the native app, which is a browser, albeit a limited one. You can have the bookmarks in the left side and the browser view on the right side.
I moved from delicious to pinboard, then from pinboard to nextcloud bookmarks, then finally to Evernote. Clipping pages to Evernote means I get both the link and a searchable snapshot of the content: helpful for discovery and if the link rots.
I went from delicious to Evernote for the same benefits. Now on Joplin.
I use notion to save links into a database.
I use Zotero with cloud sync. It's got full text search, tagging, webpage snapshotting, and PDF annotations
del.icio.us?! What memories! I remember that when I discovered it I spent 24 hours labeling my markers, I think it was back in 2008. Since it disappeared I have been using firefox bookmarks, because of its ease to make backup copies, also yesterday I discovered that they can be tagged and those terms are included in the firefox search box, so far I am happy, but it is also not I use markers very often.
Pocket doesn't seem good for anything that's not long text.

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.

I use my browser bookmarks bar for things which I want to access frequently, Notion for stuff that I want to keep "for one day, maybe" and send a link to my email for "stuff I want to read next".

Not a single app, but works for me (so far).

According to wikipedia:

> 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 :)

I always thought ausp.icio.us would have been a neat domain, shame they never did anything with that.
del.icio.us --must have been one of the worst domain names ever. OK 10/10 for making a clever word using the .us TLD extension. But I could never remember where the dot for the subdomain went: was it delic.io.us??... deli.cio.us?... del.icio.us?... de.licio.us?...

Ironic that a bookmarking website ran on a domain I had to bookmark, coz I could never remember it.

Hear hear! And since I see UK spellings of words a lot, e.g. honour vs honor, my brain was always tripping me up, telling me the last u shouldn't be there, but wait it's "us", so the "o" must not belong there!
we owned delicio.us and other domains to let us put the dots in other places, as well as delicious.com.

but i am glad you found the opportunity to do the nerdiest seinfeld impression.

  >but i am glad you found the opportunity to do the nerdiest seinfeld impression.
I've no idea who seinfeld is. But I'm sure that was a very witty riposte.
he’s a comedian whose style is to make long complaints about trivial, unimportant things.
the dev site was susp.icio.us for a while
If you would like to keep all your data private, self hosting is a good option.

- 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)

That's the exact opposite of being a spiritual successor to Delicious.

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.

FWIW, this sort of thing (Delicious-like) always struck me as a good use case for decentralization.
the big value of delicious was the central aggregation, which becomes difficult in a decentralized manner

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

How would the popular page work, then (either globally or per tag)?

That was one of the biggest things I got out of Delicious… basically Reddit without the comments.

Search from a webring of Delicious sites.
That's a good question. I'm not sure I have a good answer. My guess is it would maybe vary a bit from user to user?
I am a fan of Wallabag, I pay for their hosted service. I think I did the 9€ for one year which seemed like a good deal to me.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I stopped using many online cloud services because they get shut down or acquired by a big fish. Instead, I am using buku[1], a command-line utility to store, tag, search and organize bookmarks on a Linux desktop. But, it should work on any OS due to Python. All I have to do is backup a single ~/.local/share/buku/bookmarks.db SQLite file.

[1] https://github.com/jarun/buku

I agree about the services that keep getting shutdown and I also use the moral equivalent of a command line utility to store bookmarks but there are still benefits to "social" bookmarking, no?

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.

Up front, I never saw the value FOR ME of social networking. It was always a bit of a perplexing thing, sharing what I'm looking at with the public. I don't even look at unusual things. It just seems like private information.

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 guess that's the idea I'm trying to explore.

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?

You can try hamsterbase

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.

I use the browser's bookmark folder or reading list as my inbox and the those that make it past the interesting threshold get tagged in my org-roam repo.

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 would love something which would categorise my bookmarks for me. Right now they are just one huge bucket. It ought to be possible.

Nothing seems to do that.

https://diigo.com

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 like diigo's web highlighting feature a lot.
Wallabag, a free software alternative to Pocket, that you can self-host if you want. They also provide a service you can subscribe to. Hosted in Europe.

https://www.wallabag.it/

Well... Shaarli. Dead simple to install, no fuss. https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

I have been using it for the past 15 years with great satisfaction.

I expected this to be higher up. I used pinboard for years, but finally decided it's not worth the money. Self-hosting this requires very little resources and knowledge. Super happy with it, use it daily.
For business software, there are various sites where alternatives are suggested and debated.

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.

I'm paying for Pocket because it was roughly the same price as Instapaper but also a way to finally give Mozilla money.

Side note: Mozilla, consider a paid subscription tier!

> finally give Mozilla money

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.

Built in browser bookmarks with a built in browser account (firefox account for firefox, google account for chrome)