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Ask HN: What's a good, privacy focused bookmark manager?

69 points by southernplaces7 ↗ HN
Given that a person's bookmarks reveal some of the most personal interests, preferences and worries about that individual, it would be nice to erase them from my browser, but have them running on some privacy-focused solution that I can add new links to on the fly. Any suggestions from anyone?

52 comments

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dmbche
It's the most boring, but a text file with the urls and a title is probably your best option. Copy and paste to browser.

Encrypt the file if you want extra security and use a good password/password manager.

I understand it's not elegant UX/UI though.

southernplaces7
Interesting idea and I'll give it a try, though the thought of transferring over my existing bookmarks (very large) and giving many of them titles is daunting to say the least.
dmbche
There might he a tool to export your bookmarks to a good standard - I'll look around. I doubt you're the first to look for this!

Edit: chrome offers to export to html - might be a better start! You can then turn that into txt or copy paste what you're interested in!

mmphosis
a local html file.

    <a href="link">title</a>
In Firefox, about:config network.http.sendRefererHeader = 0
bombcar
Your password manager may have a notes option.

Send links to yourself.

__d
Try Larder? https://larder.io/

Sadly, pinboard is basically a zombie these days.

maphew
What do you mean? Pinboard is working fine for me.

Mind you I only signed up a few weeks ago so can't speak to reliability over time.

viewtransform
I've been using Pinboard for seven years. Signed up for another 10 years last year - it just works. Explain what you mean by zombie ?
__d
I've used Pinboard for years (10 year anniversary coming up in July 2023).

By "zombie", I mean that it continues to function, but it's a dead product.

Support is often non-existent, and there's been no enhancements for years. If I were looking for the same sort of product today, I'd steer clear of it in favor of something that seemed more like its operator cared.

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hxii
It seems like Larder has been mostly abandoned since 2018. (Judging by the last blog post and the roadmap)
kirubakaran
https://histre.com/

It has a strong privacy policy, full API access to all your data, and the ability download your data as a zip file. When you delete something / delete your account, it is truly gone, not soft-deleted.

It is really fast (no bloated SPAs) too.

It can automatically import your bookmarks, and will make ongoing knowledge management, sharing etc seamless.

The extensions are open source: https://histre.com/install/

As a demo of how histre automatically organizes your knowledge, check this out: https://histre.com/hn/ (Filter HN by automatic tags)

(Disclaimer: Founder)

xigoi
According to the linked page, Histre is for “supercharging Teams with AI”. What does that even mean and what does it have to do with bookmark management?
kirubakaran
Thanks for checking it out.

We’re solving knowledge management and collaboration in teams. At an individual level, bookmarks are an important input for knowledge. So we solve that.

> “Supercharing teams with AI” What does that even mean

We use gpt4 to summarize and auto organize knowledge: which could be from team chats, documentation, bookmarks, etc. This helps teams collaborate better without having to play Sherlock on team chat logs etc… hope that makes sense…

I do agree with you that I need to do a better job of describing it. I’ll work on it. Thanks for your feedback!

pbronez
Honest question: how do along “strong privacy policy” with “we use GPT-4”?

My understanding is that anything you hit an OpenAI API with can and will be used as training material for future public models. Thus it’s not safe to use their APIs with any proprietary data.

Your service seems pretty cool, but I’m nervous about connecting a pipe from my corporate chat solution to OpenAI like that.

darekkay
I've created Static Marks [0], an open-source tool that gives you the full control over your bookmarks. You can even import your existing browser bookmarks. The "add bookmarks on the fly" part is (by design) not as straightforward, though, as you have to enter your bookmarks manually into a YAML file.

[0] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

lannisterstark
Shiori is nice, and has an extension. You can self host the server.

https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

phneutral26
+1 for shiori, I have been using it since 2~ years, and it never once did something unintended.
lakomen
Trouble with every update.

When you install it, it works, but upgrading and migrations don't work, so you're stuck with an inaccessible database of bookmarks.

I was very disappointed.

justsomehnguy
Tried it RN.

Can't say it's good (a lot of rough edges in the UI) but... it works? And I pushed my FF bookmarks to it without problems. Guess I stick with it for now.

Thanks.

testacct22
You could do emacs org-mode with auto encryption

Or even better: could just make a little self hosted web app that does this for you

Or another idea (most useful for me): self host an instance of mediawiki and use it as a personal knowledge base

sureglymop
Nextcloud bookmarks and the floccus browser extension to sync the bookmarks.
nicman23
firefox sync is pretty good for that. it is e2e and you can host your own instance
lakomen
Last time I tried, v1, the setup process was very complicated.

V2 then was even more complicated and undocumented.

Has that improved?

Emigre_
https://raindrop.io/

I like Raindrop. Developed by an indie dev, no ads and tracking, revenue comes from subscriptions.

bobsoap
I second Raindrop. I've been looking for a good bookmark manager for a long time until I discovered it earlier this year. Haven't looked back.
fifafifi
Sounds like backups do not include the archives of the pages, is that correct?
approxim8ion
I use OneTab, it is perfect for me, with the caveat that it has no categorization or sync, neither of which I really need.
francisfeng
If you’re in Apple ecosystem, you should try my app Anybox: https://anybox.app

Anybox is a native bookmark manager available in macOS, iOS, and iPadOS.

The data are stored in the Apple’s CloudKit and no personal data is collected.

tsp
I am a happy Anybox user and previously used Pinboard and Raindrop. It syncs the bookmarks via iCloud.
hamsterbase
If you want to save articles, you can try using Hamsterbase.

It doesn't collect any information and doesn't require login or registration.

It offers a self-deployed version and provides desktop clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It supports full-text search.

It supports annotating web pages.

There is an open-source and free browser plugin that allows real-time annotation in the browser: https://github.com/hamsterbase/hamsterbase-highlighter.

bsnnkv
Honestly, if privacy is the primary concern, you should only be looking at self-hosted solutions.
khobragade
I use a non-synced Zotero instance. It saves everything about the pages, has snapshots for offline access and I reflect on the content in the notes. It's nice.
LanternLight83
Mildly related thought: What I need is an RSS feed, Youtube, and local file manager (for content addressed buckets) that regularly brings a handful of "items" to my attention Anki-card style for quick metadata review/updates, relative (bracket-style) ranking, monotonically-increasing "priority" counter I can tick over time, and "Do you still want to keep this?" for de-cluttering.

Will probably need to DIY, but if you know any (ideally composable) tools that can cover even a portion of this system, please let me know before I start wiring Buku into Emacs.

glorifiedgluer
My setup might not be exactly what you are looking for, but could be close enough:

1. For Atom/RSS feeds, I use elfeed-org[0]. (including YouTube channels). You can also use elfeed-tube[1] to watch videos on mpv without accessing the website. 2. For spaced-repetition, I also use org-drill[2], this makes it easy to take notes while reading PDFs with pdf-tools[3]. 3. For priority tracking, I use the builtin org-agenda with org-super-agenda[4] to create "views" based on some metadata[5].

This is all done in the same plain text format (org files) and synced in a Git repository.

[0]: https://github.com/remyhonig/elfeed-org

[1]: https://github.com/karthink/elfeed-tube

[2]: https://melpa.org/#/org-drill

[3]: https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools

[4]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda

[5]: https://gluer.org/blog/2023/simple-org-mode-setup-things-don...

RadixDLT
best bet is privacy focused browsers, brave,
goddamnyouryan
https://link.horse

I don’t have a privacy policy because I haven’t gotten around to creating one yet but yeah, like the other guys say:

- full api access - get all your data out as a zip or json or csv - when you delete something it’s truly deleted, not soft deleted.

Code-Monki
I use [nb](https://github.com/xwmx/nb). It's a CLI tool (easy to write a GUI for if you want one) that is fast, uses Git to version control things, and handles more than just bookmarks. I sync across computers using Dropbox.
DeconBlue
Not an automatic option, but it works for me.

emacs org-mode + org-cliplink + macro bound to F5. F5 -> insert org-mode style link with URL and Title. Then I can add as much description or tags as needed. If full text is needed, I might pull the site up with eww and copy/extract the text into org entry or add to org-roam for future processing.

New bookmark file per day synced via self hosted Git repo accessed over TailScale.

Manual, but full control and only available to me.