Hoarder: Self-hostable bookmark-everything app | Hacker News Reader

Hoarder: Self-hostable bookmark-everything app

github.com

475 pointsthunderbong106 comments

I tried hoarder and I didn't like the way listed view works. I prefer the simplicity of the view provided by Linkding. I find hoarder new auto tagging with ollama something I want to use because I am lazy.

For references there are many options in selfhosted bookmarking apps market. These beside Hoarder are the most known software.

Linkwarden (https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden)

Shaarli (https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli)

LinkAce (https://www.linkace.org/)

Linkding (https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding)

Wallabag (https://wallabag.org/)

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

When I use a tool like this one of the most important things is that it works offline so I can read something in a plane or on the go.

I've looked into most of these (and instapaper, pocket, etc) and ultimately found Wallabag to be the best. However, their app is quite buggy and site is fairly clunky for my taste. Luckily there's a pretty recent 3rd party client that works offline super well and is on Mac/Linux/android/iOS for free (yay flutter) https://github.com/casimir/frigoligo

Also, I'll note that it's basically a must to use the browser extension with the option to download via what the browser sees if you get content from a lot of sites. That being said the devs are super responsive to reports that sites aren't being scraped appropriately.

My biggest wish is that they supported YouTube (at least titles) and they had a way to indicate when a article needs to be scraped client side.

Now that I think about it, maybe I can write a little side script to fetch the YouTube titles and update it.

thanks for the app recomendation, didnt know about it yet..

regarding youtube, my youtube links saved with wallabager browser extension always show the correct title, are you using something else to save them?

Oh good point it does work with the browser extension. I was experiencing this when trying to add them from my phone.

Why is Wallabag better than pocket?

Imo it's only better if you expect stuff to be saved correctly for reading offline. Pocket often fails even with major news sites and just opens the link to the browser. That's a big pain for me.

Also, I don't love the ads and recommended content in Pocket.

I've had wallabag on my radar for quite a while, but I keep ending up on "... but what even is it?".

Obviously it archives things for later reading. It works great for that on my e-reader, and I'm super glad it exists and KOReader supports it.

But the API[1] is largely undocumented and undescribed, so I'm kinda at a loss as to what the goals and possibilities are, because the app leaves quite a lot to be desired for e.g. replacing personal cataloguing on something Delicious-like. It seems tailor made for small, barely-customizable offline reading (save it for reading later, maybe with tags, then archive it and don't look at it again), despite the API apparently (maybe?) offering a lot more (but not describing it so it's hard to know how it's intended to be used).

Is there, like... documentation somewhere? Particularly with capabilities / intent / goals? I'm hesitant to sink much time into it without some idea of how it thinks of itself, building a bowl of Hyrum-slaw on top of a shaky foundation is no fun for anyone involved. If it's mostly just what the core app presents, it's probably not what I want.

[1]: https://app.wallabag.it/api/doc/ and https://doc.wallabag.org/developer/api/methods/

On a plane?, do you self-host in your laptop? Or is the client having a full copy of everything, incl. images?

I don't self-host on a laptop but the client does save a lot offline including images. I assume it's just the "unread" content but I haven't actually looked into that.

One thing that I've been looking for in these, and I seem to recall few have this:

Public mode? I'd like people to NOT have to log in.

Kind of a shot in the dark, but would you (or anyone else here) remember the name/website of a similar subscription app that was modern/minimal in appearance, and iirc was developed by Chinese devs? I remember seeing it I think on HN itself, likely as a comment somewhere. (I think folks were concerned about the data storage/privacy aspect, but iirc the service was very well designed/comprehensive).

You might be thinking of https://raindrop.io which is developed by a Kazakh developer?

Thanks a lot but I don’t think it’s that, I’ve been aware of raindrop for quite some time (even before I knew of this one I think) and this app only had a paid tier, no free/selfhosted options (which is why I didn’t bother making an account.)

(Just thinking out loud.. if I were to find all HN threads discussing such apps (maybe searching for raindrop or pocket?) via the search I might find it more quickly.)

Could it be Anybox? Never used it myself but seems like a possible candidate.

https://anybox.app/

It does not have self-hosted, although it does have a free tier. The free tier is pretty limited, allowing just 50 bookmarks. So basically amounts to a free trial more than something you’d use for free for a long time, IMO.

The website is available in English and Chinese, so the developers might be from China.

Thanks a lot! There's a very reasonable chance is is anybox! (The app I was thinking about wasn't self hosted, sorry about the confusion.) I'll check archive.org to see what it looked like a few months/year ago. (The "clean" and simple name along with the landing page style is definitely similar.)

> The app I was thinking about wasn't self hosted, sorry about the confusion

My wording was a bit confusing in how I said it, but what I meant to say was that like the one you were thinking of this one is also not self-hosted.

Seems like the tag system is flat, which is a big limitation on the organization capability.

For example, I noticed that in the demo access app, there's a note about cooking, and it has 4 tags: - `baking` - `cupcakes` - `oven cooking` - `recipe`

This would get out of hand quickly.

There should be a hierarchy of tags (categories): `cupcakes` in `baking` in `oven cooking` in `recipe`

The only tag needed in this case for the note would be `cupcakes`

Hi there! I am extremely glad to read someone else write about this necessity!

I own and operate a "list-taking" app[0] in which every list/kanban-item can itself be a list/kanban.

I currently use it for things I'm the creator of -- tasks, story outlines, etc, but looking to introduce 3rd party content for task management (I want to see GitHub tasks from work next to my own tasks) and, as you say, knowledge management of things like recipes or music.

Items could be part of one or multiple hierarchies. A list of "cake" recipes could be under both "baking" and "party essentials", and music playlists could include other playlists.

As you can tell, this can become convoluted in my mind, and so if that's something that's interesting to you (or anyone reading this), please reach out and let's discuss! hn at nestful.app

[0] https://nestful.app

I may have come across your app before in passing, but hadn't checked it out. I playtested aspects of a "productivity system" (grain of salt) with paper earlier this year.

"Spontaneous productivity" mirrors some of my own thinking on the subject, especially the JIT and bubbling aspects and how they work together. I haven't seen how it works in the case of Nestful, but I'm keen to try it out. It may adjust the design principles guiding development.

The tagging system is indeed flat, but the lists can be nested. The idea being that tags are usually AI generated, and there's a lot of them (which is useful for search), but lists are meant for manual curation and this is where you can have whatever structure you want.

Happy to see that you have considered this

IMO it would be interesting to try to combine the two approaches (curation + auto tagging).

It starts out with the user scaffolding an initial hierarchy, then (after enough usage to provide meaningful data for ML predictions) the ML model predicts on subsequent entries, and asks the user for approval (which feeds a reinforcement learning model)

This is indeed the plan. We're currently working on generating embeddings for the all the bookmarks stored, and one of the usecases of this is going to be clustering. If a bookmark is similar to all other bookmarks in a list, the model can suggest adding those bookmarks to the list. Still a manual operation, but with ML assistance.

i feel this feature is not quite needed in the age of AI

> This would get out of hand quickly.

Hierarchies get out of hand quickly too. You will soon find that different people (or the same person at different times) create different hierarchies for the same thing and that the same thing belongs in multiple places.

Polyhierarchies combined with RAG is the one true way.

Just give me a Neo4j database and Cypher to query it.

I didn't know this term before, thanks! Are there any examples (e.g., products you like) that demonstrate this One True Way in practice?

Not yet.

I have been experimenting with different representations of data in Neo4j, Markdown, and Orgmode. I even tried cludging the polyhierarchies into different file systems using symlinks and tagging,

I'm still researching for better storage techniques.

I want a good mix between hand editing, but robust machine readable formats. Orgmode works pretty good, but it's fairly complicated to parse, and I think it could be improved.

The retrieval and search part could be improved with RAG, but I don't have the hardware or time at the moment to hacking around with the compute intensive AI stuff.

That seems like a silly term for a Directed Acyclic Graph

A flat tagging system doesn't require much curation while nested tags require someone to decide what tags are members of what other tags. Taken to the logical extreme a hierarchical tagging system becomes a full blown ontology.

I've saved ~50k .webarchive files from Safari in a single folder, indexed via Spotlight — not an archivist's dream, but I'm a sucker for using anything in the OS stack.

How do you save them? I would love to save every page I go to automatically since storage is so cheap and between sites disappearing and the web being so huge it can be impossible to find something later.

Hoarder's maintainer here! What a nice surprise seeing Hoarder on the homepage of hackernews!

I must ask, in your github readme you say "[Planned] Downloading the content for offline reading." but what does that mean in the context of a self hosted application? Isn't the data already downloaded - via the other features such as "Full page archival" and "Automatic fetching".

I guess one small request - could the chrome/firefox extension include a way to transfer the page data from the browser, as it's being displayed to the user? (as in, transfer the entire page/html instead of the page's link). This would likely result in much better support for nasty sites like twitter and such that require credentials, etc..!

The offline reading thing is bad wording from my side. I mean offline reading on the mobile app (when you don't have internet access / access to the server).

As for your request, we're tracking this in (https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder/issues/172), which aims to do exactly what you're asking for.

Question for ya since I'm working on an app with similar platforms - and dont know what I'm doing. I see you used expo for the mobile apps but nextjs for the web app. Why didnt you use expo for the web app too?

FYI: On the login, it tripped me up a couple of times because the username is case sensitive. There is a tradeoff between security, useability, and support requests; the input is labelled email, and email addresses are usually not case sensitive (and as email addresses used as email addresses are never case sensitive) so it confused me.

TiL. I always assumed emails were case sensitive, and doubly so if used as a username. I find it strange that you even discovered this 'wrong' behaviour on the site in question: you purposefully typed your email address with different casing when logging in vs. registering?

I have never had a email server be case sensitive, and often use that for mail filtering: myuSer@ - the big "S" is for spam!

In line with with that, I would expect the login to not be case sensitive when it accepts an email.

"I always assumed emails are case sensitive"

Wikipedia has a good summary on what is valid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address

From the second paragraph:

Although the standard requires the local-part to be case-sensitive,[1] it also urges that receiving hosts deliver messages in a case-independent manner,[2] e.g., that the mail system in the domain example.com treat John.Smith as equivalent to john.smith; some mail systems even treat them as equivalent to johnsmith.[3]

You'll find the footnote links at the Wikipedia article, I'm not going to paste the here. So yes, if my email address is my username, then I would expect it to work the same in uppercase or lowercase. If my username is "like an email address, but not an email address" then you make the rules for your site.

Hoarder has a chrome plugin, Firefox addon, and apps for Android and iOS for which the app store says something I’ve never seen before:

“Data Not Collected — The developer does not collect any data from this app.”

Noice.

This looks cool

*bookmarks it in huge Trello list where cool bookmarks go to die*

Anyone using this as an Evernote replacement?

I use Evernote since what, 2005, 2008? Yet I hate every time I start it up. Such ugly bloatware it has become. And the silly “AI powered” features tacked on when it became fashionable… Man, replacing it would feel so good.

I replaced Evernote with Joplin about 5ish years ago. It was super easy in my case, so maybe it's worth checking into. I haven't used the desktop app recently, but it was always snappier than evernote at the very least.

I use Obsidian for note-taking and personal knowledge management. I haven't used "save for later" bookmarklets or apps since I quit using Evernote many years ago, though.

If people are interested it was featured hear on HN a day or two ago but Obsidian released an extension called Obsidian Clipper that can save webpages in markdown format. https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-clipper

I use it when I need to get a table or something from a webpage. Works really well for small stuff.

I didn't know this existed for obsidian! This is perfect for me. Thanks for sharing

Can this plugin work for Chrome on Android? Does anyone have a recommendation for bookmarking and/or webclips on Android?

- Pocket for bookmarking. - Onenote for longer form less structured note taking on copied/linked base material or needing exposition (somewhat reluctantly). Occasionally Word. - Anything/Jetbrains : Markdown for short form or dev docsor with intuitively clear sub-structure or heirarchy. (Pseudo)Code and comments for simple codable ideas, python-like. - Scapple for mind-mapping high level concepts, collections of related ideas or things, associations rather than hierarchies

I use it exactly that way and publish an RSS feed of my archives: https://enlace.space/~erik/rss.xml

I use Joplin since I left Evernote. They have an import for evernote https://joplinapp.org/

Not sure hoarder is a direct replacement for evernote. As a former long time evernote note user I replaced it with https://notesnook.com

I use it for months now.

It's very good. Some points that can be improved:

- Search inside the description of the bookmark, it doesn't. - Update to a new version of hoarder. Since the software isn't stable, it's a real problem. - Related to the previous point => More archive formats.

Otherwise, it's a very good software. Easy to use, nice front-end, good UX.

Is there an official upgrade path available between versions, or do they currently break things without providing migration?

Hey, Hoarder's maintainer here. I'd like to know more about the pain you're facing when upgrading hoarder. All the releases since launch has been backward compatible, and it has always been just a matter of updating the docker images.

Also for searches, Hoarder indexes all the content of the websites it crawls. If it doesn't for you then that would be a bug!

Different user here, all of my upgrades have been completely seamless.

anyone know how this compares to archivebox?

Is it just bookmarks or does it download full pages?

Bookmark applications are generally a failure for long term storage because links always change over time.. so i'm not sure what lense to look at this app through.

It does allow content retrieval so it does save local copy. And allow even downloading videos using yt-dl.

> Bookmark applications are generally a failure for long term storage because links always change over time..

Combine them with an automatic-upload-to-archive-dot-org-(if-not-there-already?) function, and save the link to that also? Dunno if any bookmarking app has that already.

[EDIT:] Heh, look – someone is apparently doing precisely that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502175 [/EDIT]

I just boookmarked this into a “figure out where to put this later” folder, then realized the irony of that action.

Went to my para system "0 - Inbox".

Been looking at these tools and honestly, my big issue is backup - specifically, I want a dead simple way to continuously back up my links to something like S3. Not really interested in relying on the Internet Archive or having to set up and babysit yet another backup system. is it like completely antithetical to the average self-hoster ethos to use the cloud where it makes sense?

I really like hoarder, but kind of surprised how many tools either totally skip over backup functionality or treat it as an afterthought (like this Hoarder issue here: https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder/issues/75). Feels like this should be a no-brainer feature, right?

If you're hosting it yourself, I would expect that you also make backups of your whole server and/or database if one is involved. A custom backup feature built into the app seems redundant.

Just rclone the docker volume/mount to s3 or what have you. Or you can get fancy and directly do docker volumes in s3 using a storage driver.

So far I love and am probably about to go all in, especially since you can bring your own "AI."

Relatedly (and I think the authors are working on it) anyone using local AI for tags and know good ways to tweak (I'm using Ollama and would love to constrain the the tags a bit?)

Hoarder supports customizing the tagging prompt in the user settings. You can instruct the model with whatever rules you want to constrain the tags to your likings!

These types of projects always look really cool, but I always doubt they will be maintained so I decide not to use them.

I have to agree. I've been using standard notes, and honestly, will probably end up just paying for it.

Does it really matter if it's simple to export your data and then import to another bookmark manager?

Hoarder has been great. Was finally able to dump my annual $40 Pocket subscription. Auto tagging using LLM works well. Only issue I have is that mobile app doesn’t allow offline storage and viewing.

I've one I built called Cras. Store all my neat things I find on the web there. Recently turned it into a PWA so it's a share-target on my phone (Android) which is awesome.

It's self-hosted and all packed into SQLite so, IMO, very portable.

Recently added a trick to snapshot all the public links I save - my copy and on Archive.is - link rot is real.

I've been thinking about building a service that makes it easy to self host apps like this. I'm curious if you'd find it useful.

It would host webapps like yours that use in browser sqlite to store data, then the service provide a sync their sqlite data across different devices. The user not the app would pay for the storage of the data, so they would own their data. And you can use CSP to lock down the app from sharing with other domains, meaning an app can't leak your data.

The service would handle identity (only you can access your sqlite data - the app just ) and could provide an app store like experience with different apps of this type.

Sort of like a firebase style backend as a service, but the user would own the data instead of the app.

Is that what pikapods is? I ask out of ignorance, not "somebody is already doing that".

Pikapods looks to be running containers for you, preconfigured for the self hosted apps they support. That's a cool service, I assume there are other similar services around.

The concept I'm thinking about is different - it doesn't run any app code on the server, the apps are SPAs that run in the browser only (no backend supporting code), and then the server just syncs the data from the apps. This means the apps can focus on building ux/business logic and not worry about database, how data gets to/from clients, identity, etc. Somewhat like firebase but where the users pays for the server, not the app. That should hopefully be simpler for developers, and theres a lot less likelihood of issues with server config/etc (although presumably pikapod will handle that). It should also be cheaper since you're not constantly running a container, just storing data.

I'm not sure if it's a useful concept or not yet :)

I am working on this problem from another angle. Where instead of hosting, the user only has to bring a sync solution. No services or auth needed - only storage. See more here: https://github.com/jonocodes/savr?tab=readme-ov-file#why-ano...

is it open source? Can you share the link for it please.

Not yet, but I will.

> Recently added a trick to snapshot all the public links I save - my copy and on Archive.is - link rot is real.

Someone here needs exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502576 (And possibly me too.) So yeah, please do continue and then publish it.

It's a nice idea, but really, bookmarks aren't enough.

I can still distinctly remember reading a site which had Barry Hughart's typewritten notes for his novels (_Bridge of Birds_, _The Story of the Stone_, and _Eight Skilled Gentlemen_), and I considered saving the files for the image scans, but didn't figuring they would always be available.

Since then, he has passed away and the pages in question vanished (no idea on what order that occurred), and I haven't been able to figure out who is in charge of his literary estate, nor where his papers are stored.

I'd give a lot for someone to write a book examining his writings in a scholarly context.

If I think something might be interesting enough to read later, I print it to a PDF --- as a bonus, that means I can send it to my Kindle Scribe to read at my convenience.

I've given up on all these bookmark things, just automatically save page text to PC . Have a simple tool I can quickly search theses files. That's it for me. Years ago, pinboard started well, but the developers ignored support requests is its fatel problem for me.

When I think hoarder, there’s a different app I want.

We’ve got a shed full of boxes and bags of stuff. Want an easy way to take pics of the contents of a box and the “box number” and be able to browse for the box or specific contents later. Eg a home archive solution.

Anyone know of tools for that?

Inventree or homebox are what you want.

Love this app. The only thing on my wishlist is a way to "discover" stuff I've bookmarked before when googling. So the extension would search Hoarder when I search Google (or wherever search engine) and give me a list of those next to my Google search or in the extension drop-down. I sometimes forget that I bookmarked a solution 3 weeks ago, and now I'm searching for that solution again.

I think Evernote had something like this when I was using it.

I haven't tried Hoarder yet, but Linkding has a linkding-injector extension that does this. It's pretty useful.

I currently use Reader by Readwise for this purpose. 3 main things I look for in such an app are: 1. Ability to save everything including PDFs etc. 2. Ability to read offline 3. Some ability to summarize, send some reminders to read etc. are an added bonus.

I'm not sure on the support for PDFs with hoarder-app, the github README doesn't seem to mention anything about it.

The first item in the feature list for Hoarder is “ Bookmark links, take simple notes and store images and pdfs.”

Is there a way to import existing corpuses?

Thinking in particular of browser bookmark exports and Notion, I'm sure other people would like something else. Being able to parse any kind of text file for links would be great + full-text search in text files / markdown.

FYI the demo’s login credentials are case sensitive for the email field (when they probably shouldn’t be?).

> with a touch of AI

It's fascinating even to myself how fast I closed the tab. The annoyance and oversaturation with "ai" is on a level I didn't think was possible

Yet in this case quite useful

I doubt it

No reason to doubt, it can be proved empirically

But in this case, as I understood it, fully optional? (Maybe not, only read it rather cursorily.) So in that case, might be useful anyway.

Otherwise, yeah, me too.

Optional mitigates, but doesn't completely null the poisoning. People are still very allergic to inclusion of crypto stuff in software (as another example), even if it's optional.

Tbh, it sounds like 'good' AI to me. This isn't putting anyone out of a job and it's apparently optional. What's more, it can be configured to work locally, so that should take care of privacy concerns.

It sounds optional and potentially marginally useful. But I understand the OP's reaction. These days, I'm also conditioned to very quickly dismiss something that initially sounded interesting as soon as I spot those two capital letters from the corner of my eye.

For me, the sentiment is mostly, if I'm looking for a tool for something, I want it to do exactly that job, and I want to do it precisely. The presence of AI features gives me a gut feeling both of feature bloat, and that "precision" wasn't a major focus behind the application's design.

Oh, I agree 100%. I don't think I'd make use of an auto-tagging feature beyond 'preselect existing tags that occur in the text' which I - not being in Marketing - would hesitate to describe as 'AI'. I would probably disable the feature in this case, though, rather than dismiss the product entirely.

I am using it since couple of months and it works really fine. The UI is improved a lot since the first release. Tagging is not the best, but it depends a lot on the AI response

Memex is the tool I use for a similar purpose, but I still cannot find a link that I know I saved. I think this problem is not solved yet.

How do you manage restrictions on Reddit and X?

It's using a chrome instance to access JS enabled sites.

No browser plugin?

really cool!

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