Show HN: Currl – A free text-based social bookmarking website | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Currl – A free text-based social bookmarking website

currl.io

123 pointsvasanthv48 comments

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We've come full circle. :)

First there was del.icio.us.

Then reddit was started with the original idea being "del.icio.us with voting".

And now we're back to del.icio.us!

> Then reddit was started with the original idea being "del.icio.us with voting".

I believe the original "del.icio.us with voting" was Digg [1]:

> Digg also faces competition from other social news services like Reddit, Newsvine, and Netscape, and while none of them has gotten to Digg’s level, it’s still early in the social news race.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20061013230150/http://www.conver...

The reddit founders had no awareness of Digg until a few months after they launched. Also, Digg didn't have downvotes, which was a key innovation, because technically delicious already had "upvotes" based on how many people bookmarked the same site.

And when we visited Digg later on, we (reddit) discovered that we had double their traffic.

Digg had better marketing but reddit was bigger for most of it's life.

I suspect one factor in early reddit growth was early promotion on and rapid adoption by many of the (original) freenode IRC crowd (and extended spouses, famil, etc).

I recall the days when it was a "proof of concept" single page lisp based site(?) that got taken on as the default place to post links for ranking and persistant comment (alongside other tool sites like pastebin for text content pastes etc.)

The early theoretic comp sci posts died off and cats took over, followed by subredits etc .. and here we are :-)

Sure. I did not imply reddit copied Digg. Just pointing out the fact that Digg was chronologically the first (or at least earlier than reddit).

> The reddit founders had no awareness of Digg until a few months after they launched.

This is an interesting anecdote as Digg was already big by then (they actually released Digg 2.0 in July 2005, the same month reddit launched).

Is it open source and self-hostable? At this point I no longer trust these kinds of services since they always seem to be abandoned, suffer from enshittification, or just degrade. I need to know I can migrate easily once it happens.

pinboard.in has been around for quite awhile :)

That is the exact service that came to mind when I saw the words “abandoned” and “enshittification”.

For anyone reading this, consider

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34062802

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

Pinboard is abandoned. Not just in the sense that no new features have been added in years, but in the sense that existing features are actually broken and are not being fixed, despite still accepting money from customers.

I feel obliged to point out that the term 'abandoned' might be misinterpreted here.

I use pinboard every day, have done so for a decade and it works exactly as intended.

The fact that there have been no recent new features troubles me not one jot, my keyboard hasn't had any recent new features either, it just works.

Judging by the last time pinboard was mentioned on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34062802, the 'archive' feature, which is a 'pay extra' feature, causes dissatisfaction amongst some people, I can't comment on that as I don't use it.

Pinboard is run by a single person so if you're a user it would be sensible to use the 'export' function from time to time to allow for the owner getting sick etc.

It's pretty low to take money from people for new signups, while knowing that features are broken for your existing customers and doing nothing to even acknowledge you're aware of it. When it's pointed out here on HN, idlewords (Pinboard owner/operator) just turns up and makes comments mocking everyone and leaves again.

My pinboard account still works fine too but I moved to raindrop.io recently because it's the same thing as Pinboard, done better, with apps, and a dev that cares.

Might not be abanndoned but it's certainly in "fend for yourself" mode.

I pay for archiving and it was broken for a bit. I've emailed him a few times about it and I can say that it is totally working now—like save a bookmark and it's archived same day or sooner.

If you sign up for Pinboard at this point and expect new features, then it's on you. I pay for uptime and maintenance. (Paid in 2010, 11k bookmarks, very satisfied.)

linkding hit the spot for me. self hosted with simple API. https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

There is Shaarli and Wallabag (archives pages to read later) Both open source and self hostable.

May be worth checking out Bookmark OS (https://bookmarkos.com). Been around for 8 years and I am continuing to add features!

maybe not a name that is nearly the same as a very popular tool?

Agreed, that name is catastrophically horrible.

I think the pun is "See you, URL", but I agree that it makes it horribly confusing.

But it has a double "r" not double "u"

OMG you're right! XD

I remember Firefox spent quite a bit of effort trying to establish themselves as Phoenix or Firebird before eventually settling on Firefox. I hope currl can move on to a new name quickly and build their reputation there, instead of adding confusion to cURL's name.

    curl -io currl.io currl.io

Beautiful site, nice simple design! I love seeing other text-based sites as I have made a few of my own and it's such a joy to work on them.

In general though, I've moved on from saving links, and I think saving links and bookmarks doesn't really serve a purpose for me.

These days I save highlights and store the links/books/locations as metadata, because I'm more interested in a searchable collection of _what_ I found interesting instead of _where_ I found something interesting (without the context of what that something was).

There are some previous discussions[1] on HN about how I achieve this if this way of thinking seems as intuitive to anyone else as it does to me.

[1]: Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33627603

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33556765

I use a similar thing [1], self baked. I have a bookmarklet to bookmark pages but it also downloads image/videos/gfycats and saves them on the server.

[1] https://wecoso.de/bloogmarks

It took me solid 2mins to figure out that each text thing is a link. 2 mins i would not give to this site if I had encountered it anyplace other than HN. You might want to do something to make clear what is a link.

I am on mobile, using the brave browser.

I'd like to see custom css support, like a field to input it, so that I could have one link per line, all very compact.

give me apache directory listing styled websites or give me death

I miss del.icio.us too. :D Nice work!

pinboard.in still rocking!

I thought pinboard.in is not longer maintained? "Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34062802) There's also a June, August, November edition.

Reading that thread from December, it looks like Pinboard’s archive service is not in good health, but the core bookmarking service is still operating correctly. I didn’t really remember that Pinboard had an archiving service (delicious didn’t), but yep, that extra component appears to be suffering.

It still works fine for me including archiving. So either it's very resilient or there is maintenance happening.

He's stated in past threads that whether it works or not for you depends on what machine your account gets assigned to. So it's not resilient or maintenance, some machines are borked and others aren't. Pray you aren't on the borked machine.

I came to write this but you beat me. Kudos :D I loved that site

a nice and clean site! assuming you want folks to use your service/sites. some suggestions: - if you get a way to let folks to download their own bookmarks as a backup, that could remove some concern... - as the name implied, if you could provide a terminal cli, that will be a plus too.. my 2c...

That is a great idea. I am gonna add the ability to download bookmarks from the site right away. Thanks

First of all, this is a great url. In my head it's like

"Ooooh, currl, did you SEE this"

Simple and straightforward. I like it

Any chance on adding RSS support for the Followings section?

Thank you. Yes RSS is in my radar.

Thank you. Simple design = very useful. I like the bookmarklet.

The community at https://ln.ht is low key thriving also... great design and supports RSS.

Had my share of free beer for eternity.

That said, like the barebones design.

Not for me, but good luck.

what is the popularity metric ?

del.icio.us is back!

bad name

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