Pinboard vs. Raindrop
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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
Two things that I think are very important in a bookmarking app (and why I‘ve been working on making one of my own on and off for a while): open source and offering an API for other tools to build upon. The current API on linkhut aims to be bug for bug compatible with pinboard while being more OAuth-y.
I’m still working on a snapshotting feature similar to pinboard’s, once that’s ready I think I’ll call 1.0 complete. Perhaps I’ll do a Show HN then.
you want to export as html, in netscape format
Tried it as an experiment (I'm planning on staying with Pinboard, at least as long as it keeps working), but it keeps failing, at least when trying to import as HTML.
Could also be "outsourced" to archive.org and submitted there for the user (and to the benefit of others).
Are you open to external contributions? If so, what's a good/useful place to start?
EDIT: if I would self-host this, I would want to run it in a Docker container. Is that something where I could help?
I could be mistake but isn’t a site like Pinboard largely static.
Not if you want to make AND operations with tags (which is crucial functionality for bookmarking).
If you'd like to employ JS to progressively-enhance your user experience, great. If you are architecturally requiring JS for basic functionality? stop.
After a few years of using it I signed up for an archival account (which costs extra $39 per year). My credit card was charged, but I wasn't able to archive any page; the option to do so was never there. I emailed support (I guess it goes directly to Maciej) and NEVER got an answer, despite being a paid customer and following up several times. I ended up having to do a charge-back on my credit card. Very unprofessional.
On the flip side, that made me look into self hosting and now I happily run a linkding [1] instance on my NAS. I never really cared about the social aspect of it.
--
Actually... I just checked my emails. My account never upgraded after payment (it was still standard) and the check-mark didn't appear next to my links. And of course there was no way for me to see the archived page or request an archive backup.
I’m considering moving to just using the SavePage (or whatever it was called) browser extension with a text file for the metadata (url, tags, titles, notes) on a NAS.
Try Zotero. (I tend not to use its notes and tags features, however—even though it has them. I just defer to Hypothesis for that.)
I would be happy to have access to some delicious dumps, I know people made them before delicious went down.
Maybe the new version wasn’t as good but when I left it wasn’t easy. Any at scale scraping was easy to detect since the site was so resource impoverished that it would have a performance impact.
I have enormous nostalgia for Del.icio.us that @joshu created.
> You asked to download your archive on 2022-10-04 17:36:42.
> You'll get email once the download link is ready.
Fortunately XML/HTML/JSON backups still work, so moving to another service should be easy.
Do we know if he's okay?
He last commented on HN four days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords
It's felt to me for a long time that Maciej is burnt out and Pinboard is on a slow death spiral. It's one thing to leave good-enough alone and not develop new features, but it's another to not fix the things that are broken and let the product continue to gather rust - especially when you've moved your customers from one-time payments to subscriptions.
It's really too bad - it seemed like there could have been an enormous amount of inertia after the rather poetic del.icio.us acquisition, and the release of the archival feature was promising.
I'm still hopeful though, and that's why so far I continue to pay my $40/year.
But... I (almost) never lookup any of my bookmarks. Googling is faster -- and safer, since it's possible I'm wrong and didn't actually bookmark what I'm looking for.
Bookmarking satisfies the mind; it's a bit like hoarding. Maybe the best bookmarking service would be a mock interface that doesn't actually do anything.
[1] - Slightly related, https://xkcd.com/979/
This is happening to me right now! There's a bug in Reaper (a DAW) about handling gamepads. I found out that the bug was submitted first in... 2009, got no response from the devs and was not fixed. It does feel lonely sometimes.
I really like Firefox's built-in bookmark manager. It supports both hierarchy and tags and, if you export your Pinboard bookmarks to html, the file will include the tags which Firefox will preserve just fine when it imports everything.
I don't use Firefox as my day to day browser but all of my bookmarks live in there and I can search them from there much faster than any website. Those bookmarks live in a sqlite file which is easy to browse (good luck reverse engineering its schema though) so if anyone fancied knocking up a command line tool to search it I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult.
There are hundreds of fool-save options that make it so you don't have to depend on a third party, here are some: You could email the links to students. List them on the personal website that this is written on. Have a reader that lists them. Co-host them with the rest of the assignment.
My first thought was also “file -> save as” and share the html.
But does he necessarily know how to host an html page? Maybe he needs the tags page to be updated throughout the semester?
Regardless, he is right to feel that pinboard owed it to him to give him a heads-ups on depreciation of a feature.
--pinboarding since 2011
[1]: https://pinboard.in/u:ianchanningIf anyone is building one of these bookmark apps, one of the killer features for me is the ability to highlight and annotate a copy (in case it disappears) of the page, so I know why I even cared about it in the first place.
> Raindrop displays by very-poorly-implemented “relevance” by default at all times (that is, not just in response to a search, where this might make sense if the implementation weren’t so awful), and this default cannot be changed, so I have to click twice every time I load a Raindrop page to switch to reverse-chronological.
When I open Raindrop it always remembers last sort (chronological), so I never have to click sorting button ever again.
That’s 168 ways to display bookmarks, and every collection can have a different sort.
The site and apps sync and remember these display options flawlessly.
I wonder if that didn't work out somehow, and revenue wasn't enough to encourage development/maintenance of the service. I've not logged in for years though, so the site's not been on my radar until today.
Author makes some good points, but I still argue Raindrop is a superior product depending on your perspective as a bookmark tool user. Pinboard feels dead/abandonware unfortunately.
(Paying Raindrop user, no other affiliation)
Their UX was great, but it's a nice case study that if you don't focus on the seemingly little but important things (like making Auth seamless and bulletproof), everything else is meaningless.
Dropbox is the same way. Opening a document never chooses the right account (corp vs personal), constantly clears SSO session, and I usually give up 95% of the time instead of using the app.
Do you pay for archiving? Have you tested that it’s working?
This is my thing about Pinboard drama (and Go drama, and Signal drama) on HN. It's made to seem like a gripping psychodrama. But there's less going on than you think. I'm telling you: I use Pinboard every day, it's been rock solid for me, I don't use archiving all that often, but I clicked around and all my archivey things seem to be working. That's all I've got for you.
Edit: I see you've edited your comment to answer my question. Well, all I can say is that's an interesting choice from someone whose bill rate is so high.
I don't doubt anyone who says they're having problems with Pinboard. Stop paying for it. Get your money back. It's a product, not a religion. Read the thread, though, and notice how many people are confused about that. You just asked me, a Pinboard customer, to go fix Pinboard for people having problems with it. Uh, no? I'm a user, not a parishioner.
I'm not asking you to fix it for them (That'd be crazy!) But if you're going to engage, perhaps you could engage beyond "wfm mic drop"? I'm not saying you need to get involved at all. But you chose to!
Now that our good intentions are worked out, it's probably silly for us to keep going with this thread. Somebody on another thread just said "Boiler Room is an incredible movie" and I need all my energy for that thread now.
That said, I sent in a question / request months ago and never received a reply. I imagine they're busy but it was a little disconcerting being a long-term user and pre-paid subscriber for the next 5? years to not even get a 'thanks for the message' reply.
This is why I stopped using Pinboard, otherwise I'd probably still be a paying user.
The other issue is to retroactively get local snapshots of these pages when the bookmark collection already consists of several thousand items.
Focuses on local storage, easily syncs between devices (via centralized server that i have to pay each month though)...
Or, you could just simply self-host the sync server by yourself.
SQLite? that somehow is stored locally, even on desktop? Could Litestream or some other new tech like that help here?
Or file-based? with some sort of sync-based system? Manual syncing or automatic? Similar to dropbox, I guess
I struggle to clearly see how local storage could be achieved technically
Each bookmark is saved as a markdown file so syncing is straightforward. I mainly use it with the command line interface but you can also use a UI running in the browser.
Some comparison on the about page against other services: https://bort.io/about.html
It’s way too complicated for me with a too steep learning curve, but as I understand it it’s the gold standard of “information management” and its active users adore it.
I'm a heavy Raindrop user and have been extremely happy with the service. I don't really use the social features, though.
One thing that I found really lacking in Raindrop and other alternatives was the support for treating online commentary as a first class citizen, which ultimately led me to develop my own little service which has served me very well since 2020.[1]
I have made it available to others to use over a 2-year-long free beta test which will end this year, but ultimately I'm starting to think that this kind of service is just so personal (or maybe, that my own needs are so individual?) that it's hard for users to settle on a service in this area that leaves them feeling completely satisfied.
[1]: https://notado.app
It's not something I've thought extensively about. I imagine the worst case scenario (outside of having to comply with legal orders) would be having to disable public feeds for somebody, but I'm not too comfortable getting into specifics based on hypotheticals at this point. Hopefully I'll never have to cross that bridge, but if I do, I'll cross it when I come to it.
With first-class paragraphs, how do you position yourself in relation to Obsidian and Roam?
>https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
Looking at that example, is it possible to add comments to the quotes? I am looking for a timeless service where I can share a bookmark with others and have them add their comments, preferably openly with ActivityPub. Your Kulli service seems to be a complement for that:
>https://kulli.sh/search?q=https://www.wired.com/story/twitte...
It would be nice to discover people with the same interests and their links about the same topic.
Do you have plans to extend kulli.sh to include Twitter and other social networks? The difficulty of ranking a huge amount of comments seems to be accessible with the history of good comments from notado.app.
> With first-class paragraphs, how do you position yourself in relation to Obsidian and Roam?
I don't use or see the utility of tools like this personally; they are in my mind a great example of Žižek's take on Lacanian "surplus enjoyment".
I imagine some people will nevertheless want to take things they save to Notado and export them to Obsidian, Roam, Notion etc., and I have built out incremental export APIs for people who have this particular use case.
> Looking at that example, is it possible to add comments to the quotes?
No, this is an anti-feature in my opinion for the same reason I mentioned above. People who want this would be better served using Notado as a unified content ingestion engine (comments, article highlights, kindle highlights etc.) and redirecting to the tool of their choice; anything from org-mode to Roam.
Commenting on content is such a difficult thing to get right and so many people have their own deeply ingrained ways and expectations around this that I believe it's best to delegate to the end user.
> I am looking for a timeless service where I can share a bookmark with others and have them add their comments, preferably openly with ActivityPub
I generally like having these conversations in real-time as much as possible, but I think there is a great idea somewhere in here. Let me chew on this for a bit.
> It would be nice to discover people with the same interests and their links about the same topic.
This is what Notado Feeds are intended for; I would love for it to catch on by people including links to their Feeds home in their bios on Mastodon, Twitter, Github etc. (this is what I do!)
I'm also looking at creating a hub to improve the discoverability of user-curated topic feeds, searching by tags, showing the most popular feeds by number of RSS hits etc.
> Do you have plans to extend kulli.sh to include Twitter and other social networks
Twitter was never really on the cards because it's such a developer-hostile platform to work and integrate with, and given its ongoing implosion this is even less likely to happen. I'm interested in somehow trying to include Mastodon (or specific Mastodon instances maybe?) in the future, but that's about all that's on my radar for the immediate future.
> The difficulty of ranking a huge amount of comments seems to be accessible with the history of good comments from notado.app.
This is a really cool idea; I would love to be able to even highlight or filter comments on a link from users whose comments I have previously saved on my Notado account on Kullish!
Here's where it's being hosted as a service: https://fragments.me
Here's the open-source code: https://github.com/squallstar/fragments
Running it on your own should take minutes as it's just a Meteor app, so anything like a cheap ubuntu box with node.js and meteor would do.
The visual presentation is a near complete clone of Pinboard. It also provides a route for Pinboard import.
Bookmarking services let you write your own title/blurb/tag so now it is /actually/ findable.
I will give this another think though, thank you!
Message me if you’d like to talk.
The only time I bookmark something is when I find something interesting that I wasn't looking for OR some obscure page that's hard to get to in a SASS product.
It's too much work curating bookmarks, and for me the utility marginal at best. Often times when I go to look up a saved bookmark, the page has moved so I have to find it again anyway.