Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us? | Hacker News Reader

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

223 pointstunnuz171 comments

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.

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I’m working on an open-source social bookmarking site in Elixir that is API compatible with delicious/pinboard. Its named linkhut and it’s currently able to import your bookmarks from pinboard and browser exports.

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).

This looks cool. An unsolicited anecdote from a former huge delicious/stumbleupon guy, what made these sites awesome for me was the backfill of amazing content that other people had already cataloged. I didn’t share much, I just enjoyed other people’s content.

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?

This is definitely something I’ve been giving a lot of thought. I still haven’t made my mind about this but what I do know is that IF I do something like this I would:

- 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 :)

There was a time I would only search in del.icio.us instead of Google because the content quality was much better. So if you go this way, please don't fill it with content from botfarms posting to reddit. Keep it to small, well moderated subreddits.

This would be cool as a federated social media app. As in, I'd like to run my own server for this with my own users, but I'd also like to share and interact with others' servers and users, as well.

Check out http://pinboard.in/resources/ ... and that's not purely a recommendation to look at pinboard; scroll to the bottom of Resources & there's a list of alternatives. Many of which are mentioned here. Pretty bold, in my opinion, to list those and offer pinboard at $22/year (which actually seems like a good price). For the record, I'm using Instapaper and Safari's built-in (synced) bookmarks. So apparently, I'm not spiritually aligned.

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.

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.

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)

My favourite self hosted option so far because it's fairly minimal but does offline archiving:

- Shiori (https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori)

Been using this for years, and it works well for me.

I would also add:

- archivebox (https://archivebox.io/)

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.

From my experience, simplicity and portability is really the key to a long term and effective bookmarking system.

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 agree that the browser's built-in bookmarks manager is underrated. I never really got the social bookmarking phenomenon.

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.

I first checked out Hypothesis back sometime in the early 2010's and it really captured my imagination for a time. Unfortunately, like with all other bookmark-like services I have tried over the years, I did not use it regularly and it faded out of my habits rather quickly. I did attempt to pick it up again a year ago to make use of shared annotations while learning together with a friend, but we only used it for a short while before forgetting about it. I think Hypothesis is really great for those who make heavily use of it's core features on a regular basis – but I don't.

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 :)

> Unfortunately, like with all other bookmark-like services I have tried over the years, I did not use it regularly and it faded out of my habits rather quickly.

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.

>Adding a star (*) to the address bar limits the search to bookmarks only

I did not know this, this will make searching through hundreds of bookmarks so much easier!

I should mention that I do not use the star that often because I have disabled the history function in Firefox completely, including deletion of all cookies (except a few whitelisted ones) when closing the program. I also have a bookmark folder where I put my most used websites, sometimes adding a keyword (shortcut) to gain quick access to them. Disabling auto-completion of search terms has also focused and simplified my use of the address bar.

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.

https://raindrop.io/

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.

pinboard.in but Maciej appears to be offline (?) at the moment and archiving is a bit broken (for me). Hope he's OK.

IIRC Maciej even bought del.icio.us

Yep: https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...

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.

And blog.pinboard.in shows default Apache stub...

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.

It is faster to use the bookmarklet

Definitely this!

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...

This should work, note the http vs https https://blog.pinboard.in

> 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.

Using it on an iPhone 12 Mini-Firefox and the “Add Bookmark” screen is a tiny form in an ocean of white emptiness.

https://ibb.co/jZgzQnF

I rarely add links on mobile so I'd forgotten that was still an issue, my use case is mostly searching/browsing my own existing bookmarks

On iPhone I use an app[1] for a nicer experience.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/pins-for-pinboard/id1547106997

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).

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard? 2022-03-10

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628375#30657065

idlewords: "Archiving (mis)behavior depends on what machine your account is assigned to"

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.

Thank you. :-)

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 built my own https://www.kontxt.io and hit the front page of HN not too long ago. It's a modern hybrid productivity and social bookmarking / news / knowledge aggregation service. Think social web layer with CMS and social network. You can save the site / pdf (link or archive), engage with highlights, comments, and polls. There's privacy controls. It's searchable. Everything can be organized with tags as well as folders. You can join groups and follow people to discover shared content. Highlights can be shared natively to popular social platforms and observed with analytics. User's can also set a personal promotion with what they share as an added benefit and incentive to provide value.

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.

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/

I built a system called Tap [0]. It does a lot more than collect bookmarks, but the bookmark functionality[1] is solid.

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 trello for links lately, since lots of my surfing is project-oriented

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)

Personally I am using GoodLinks: I am most of the time on mobile and it has good support for iPhone and iPad. You can add custom tag, mark link as ‘read’ when bookmarking. Simple but does what I need.

App Store link: <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodlinks/id1474335294>

Not related to the developer, just a happy user.

https://www.are.na/

Is this the motivation I need to reboot my https://curabase.com efforts?

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

Yes, please! Looks great.

I made on a long time ago... but it's not so successful:

http://tentacle.rupy.se

I use Zotero with cloud sync. It's got full text search, tagging, webpage snapshotting, and PDF annotations

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.

This is just sort of how the internet is going right now. Global, free services like that are starting to make less money. Facebook is circling the drain, Twitter is in hot water. Going decentralized is sort of getting more popular. Companies are focused more on profitability than growth right now, so there's little incentive to grow these platforms and more incentive to ruin them in the hopes of making money.

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.

> free services like that are starting to make less money

GDPR's fault?

They made money by making all their users angry and depressed and they're finally getting tired of it. I think GDPR and the rest are just reflections of their user's fatigue.

Do you really believe Facebook is circling the drain? Still quite literally 1.97bn daily active users, and they made $28.82bn per the most recent quarterly report.

I dislike Facebook as much as the next person, but this is just straight up disinformation.

For the curious, yes, I do think so. Sure, it's big; doesn't mean it's not getting smaller. I also think that it will continue to get smaller. I think its heyday is past.

I use https://histre.com/, which also has a Hacker News integration.

Thanks. It is fast. It gives you bookmarks with notes, highlights, collections, publishing, and sharing. The browser extensions are open source. I’ve described additional features here: https://histre.com/features/

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.

Histre used to offer full text search of your entire browsing history but that appears to have been quietly shuttered. I tried recently to search even the free limit's recent history for bits of text I knew these pages included but alas.

Can you please email me at k@histre.com?

I've been using Pocket for quite some time. Exported from Pinboard IIRC. Dead simple with browser extension and app integration on mobile. If you have the app installed on your phone, you can use the "share" icon on any other app to send a link to Pocket. https://getpocket.com/my-list

I want to upload a big collection of URLs (or a small collection or just one URL - occasions vary) and get subject tags assigned automatically (then I would download the dataset back). This is about functional programming, that is about Star Wars, other two are about healthcare etc. del.icio.us could do this. Pocket can do it (albeit not for free). Are there more alternatives?

Host your own using LinkAce (https://www.linkace.org)

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.

Depends on your goals with this.

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 building Scriffer.com as a platform to save all your thoughts on internet content. You can highlight and share pages and they’re all saved for later.

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.

It's offline. Hug of death or not yet published?

Weird, not showing any downtime, perhaps DNS not propagated yet as I only published yesterday on the new domain.

Domain needs www: https://www.scriffer.com/

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

I created one for my own usage, and I gave it for free for other to use too: https://yabs.io (Yet Another Bookmarking Service)

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

Call me old-fashioned, but I use Cmd-D to save bookmarks, and either the search bar or the bookmark library to organize/look through them. When I decide I want to blow away my operating system, I export my bookmarks and import them at the new incarnation.

The problem is link rot and searching contents for me

Use OSlash www.oslash.com

How do online services solve link rot?

As a service user by archiving a copy of the page. Or via internet archive

Internet archive is possible with regular bookmarks too, using extensions like web-archives, allowing you access the archived version in a click.

https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

Try this one: https://t.me/aquilanet_bot

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.

I have a big friends group on Telegram approaching 33 people. How does BotMark improve on the Links tab that every Telegram group contains already?

This is good! I use Raindrop and IFTTT, and it works like magic. I can also use Telegram in Vivaldi Web Panel and use custom shortcuts keys (browser recipes) that automatically open up web panel after I select address to be shared. The process is intuitive and efficient.

Very very early days, but a friend of mine is working on: https://thresholdlabs.io.

you should try omnom, v1 has been created when del.icio.us was sold. it has been revamped into a v2 earlier this year: https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom

distinguishing features: selfhosted, in-browser-snapshots-as-currently-rendered for archival and against linkrot.

I'm building https://mitta.us/ and although it's currently targeting GPT-3 developers, I originally developed it to store webpages and provide full text search.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT0u-iUxUWk

What I'm really missing is not del.icio.us but the project from where it all started, memepool.com and its dry humor - see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20060519101406/http://www.memepo...

For those using Pinboard, make sure you export your bookmarks regularly so you have a local copy. I have a strange feeling the service will go bust in a number of years. It's been in maintenance mode for a while and is coasting along, but remember, services on the net are largely ephemeral and Pinboard has had a good run. That's only my gut feeling though.

I selfhost linkding (https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding) and I'm very happy with it because it got browsers plugins (firefox & chrome) so adding something to it is extremely quick (literally a couple of clicks)

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.

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.

Not exactly a successor, but if you want to store links and make them into a shortcut, you can use OSlash - https://www.oslash.com/

Very handy way of using your daily links such as - o/roadmap - o/allhands - o/issue/{search}

I moved from del.icio.us to Google Bookmarks when they shut down. Then when that one shut down I moved to Pocket. I guess it's a 10-year-ish cycle..

I never used del.icio.us but it does appeal to me. I build my own bookmark system that I self-host. I use too many systems and browsers to use the bookmarking in browsers. I used to use Google Bookmarks but I imported everything into my own tool now. Still working on a v2...

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.

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 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).

If you are on the Mac, give my app Anybox a try.

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

I’m using Telegram for this. Create a channel, sends your bookmarked links there, use the hashtags to tag things. You can share the channel with others and you can write bots for integration with other apps/browsers.

Super basic, but I recently made my own: https://github.com/blakewatson/bookmarks

I'm not familiar with del.icio.us but I wonder if https://mymind.com/ could work for you.

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.

This could be an interesting use case for IPFS and maybe blockchain. I don't know how many bookmarks I have lost in dying services.

Why blockchain? Why not an open export standard that you backup regularly either manually or via an API to a third-party cloud storage provider? Why does it need to live in the cloud? Why not your own server or local device? There isn't one valid usage scenario for blockchain that actually makes sense versus existing solutions.

My though was :

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!

There's absolutely no reason why backing up would need to be manual if you utilized a third-party cloud storage API. Perfect example: you can sync Broken Sword 2 save files between platforms via Dropbox, automatically, even on iOS. If it can happen for a game, why not a bookmarks system? But to be honest, why not just sync via a browser extension? Plenty of browser extensions already use Mozilla/Firefox or Google accounts to sync their storage.

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.

What's wrong with Instapaper. I use it to store bookmarks. IMO it's got most common requirements one would need.

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://tefter.io It also supports teams and shortcuts (url aliases).

I use Signal's Note to Self for all my "diary" stuff, photos and links. It also works across all my devices.

I use notion to save links into a database.

pinboard is the spiritual successor. However, in general, bookmarking as a thing seems to have gone away from what it was back then when saving and sometimes sharing your bookmarks was an actual social sort of things/information pathway.

https://glasp.co/

Spiritual successors are so hard to find.

I could use one for RadioUserland and another for CityDesk

Is that what the awesome-* repos have become?

Why not just use Google bookmarks?

iCloud syncs all bookmarks in Safari seamlessly if you’re in the Apple ecosystem.

I use and love pinboard.in

Raindrop.io

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