Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites?

I sometimes describe Instapaper as "/dev/null for web content". I reflexively share to Instapaper not to read it later, but to absolve guilt for not reading it at all. It is one of my weirdest web habits, on reflection.

OTOH, back when del.icio.us was good, I used it for roughly the same purpose.

These days, I still send links to Instapaper when they are essays or articles. I send links to Raindrop.io when they are anything else, basically anything the Instapaper text extractor would fail on. Things like repos, interactive charts/graphs, photographs, videos, etc.

I still think it is behaving roughly as /dev/null. I do sometimes think that, at least nowadays, you can ask an LLM to visit your bookmarked links and do some semantic search over them. But I guess the best use case is just saving it for later/never rather than wasting time on it now.

Yeah, I bookmark stuff, but just in my browser. No apps or extensions — keeping it simple.

Bookmarks... This is a rabbit hole I dive down at least once a year. And always come up disappointed.

The problem with discussing bookmarks is that everyone has different needs. Some people want a system that takes snapshots, generates pdfs, allows for offline viewing, creates AI summaries, lets you share with other users, (supports other users), archives everything into a database, and more. Other folks just want a simple, literal bookmark system that only manages links to websites.

If you're in the latter category (like I am), the perfect system already exists. It's called xBrowserSync and it's wonderful. It's open source. You can self-host the sync server. Data is encrypted before leaving the client. It has browser extensions. It has an Android app. And it uses tags / search instead of endlessly nested folders.

But there's one huge problem: The project has been abandoned for years. The public sync servers are still up and running. But the Chrome extension has fallen into disrepair. I use Firefox, so I'm still good, but for how long?

And so every year I go on this quest to gauge the state of bookmark managers. It seems everyone is trying to build the 1st kind of system. I get it. You're not gonna convert users to subscriptions with a simple link database. But that's not the system I want.

So if you're just looking to sync web links between devices, in a private, browser agnostic way, organized with search tags instead of folders, and without having to manage a huge tech stack. Your current options are: xBrwoserSync, Linkding, Shaarli, and LinkAce.

I still bookmark websites. Just in the standard browser, not in Pocket, etc.

I found searching for and finding bookmarks a pain, so made a Chrome extension to natural language search with lunr.js. It works nicely and I open-sourced it.

Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bookmark-search/fcj...

Code: https://github.com/jamesrr39/chrome-bookmark-search

I still bookmark using my browser. Periodically I back them up.

Additionally, if the content is of long term interest, I post the link to archive.org, ensuring its continual availability. (As a college professor, I have found too many great resources vanish with nothing as good replacing them. When that happens I just change the URL to the Internet Archive version.)

There are plenty of options still out there (raindrop.io, Instapaper, Safari’s reading list, etc). No need to vibe code your own, unless you want to.

For read-it-later type bookmarking, like Pocket, I gave up. I never actually go back to read things later.

For “social” bookmarking, like delicious, I never really understood it, but I think sites like Reddit ended up filling that niche. My mental framework was always an evolution of forums, not bookmarking.

For most things, I can do a search and get to something faster than going to my bookmaker.

I use my standard browser bookmarks for my own little sites and things I go to multiple times every day. Then I have some others tucked away for cool sites that I think would be hard to find again. I then forget these exist and never visit, but when I remember they exist every 18 months or so, I go through them and they’re cool.

Yes. Not interested in putting them in the cloud in the slightest. 99% of what's on my desktop i don't want/need on my phone, work or whatever.

People misusing tabs for bookmarks need to get their head checked. Surely the only way you find anything is in the address bar anyway, an there they are equivalent.

Yes, but I can never find what I'm looking for again because I don't organize them myself and Firefox mobile's bookmark search is bordering on unusable. Sorting by date doesn't seem to work at all and I can't find anything I've bookmarked in the past year.

I want a separate, local-only, bookmark application that saves the bookmark, takes a full snapshot of that page, and lets me grep through all the snapshots for whatever I'm searching for. So many of my bookmarks right now are suffering from link rot, a really cool feature would be to take bookmarks in your browser, and, if dead, search on waybackmachine and snapshot it.

I still use traditional browser-based bookmarking, and sync with my Firefox account. I don't see the need to share my bookmarks.

I bookmark things in Firefox. No addons or online services. I only browse the web from a Linux mini-PC that is dedicated to HN. I periodically export them as a date-named json and html file and that gets backed up to a dozen external devices.

HN itself is a bookmarking tool, BTW

The management and search and annotation options are very weak, but when you submit a link here at HN, you are also making a permanent bookmark that will remain accessible via your account

Self hosting Karakeep[0] for this. I think next step is to carve out time on Sunday morning to go through things and put them in lists of read vs unread.

[0] https://karakeep.app/

Sure do. I use Buku and the firefox extension. I have a command line alias that shows me all my bookmarks so can grep for certain keywords and cms-click to open them. It works a treat!

Prior to that, I used pinboard (rip).

I'm using linkding: https://linkding.link/.

It works great. It has a minimal set of features and can be self-hosted.

I'm paying pikapods to host it for me, but if I needed to, I can switch to doing it on my own.

Yes, I have a lot of bookmarks. When I bookmark a page, I add some keywords to the bookmark's title so I can easily find it in the future. It's not strictly tagging, I just try thinking of words the future me could use when searching for a particular bookmark.

However, I've never used any bookmarking service. It makes sense if you want to share your bookmarks, but I prefer to keep them private.

Yes I heavily use bookmarks. I got back into it a few years ago when I quit going to large forums like Reddit and needed a way to remember important URLs I knew I'd want later.

I keep them in an HTML file in git along with all my dot files.

After years of jumping between different platforms and systems I've landed on linkhut [0]. I like that it's social by default and chronological-oriented, with flexible but really basic options for organization (tags and 'read later' flag). It makes it so that bookmarking neat things actually feels like it has a point, even if I don't always organize them in a way I can easily find later.

[0] https://linkhut.org/

Yes, extensively. Mostly stuff that HN helps me find, that I then curate further for myself, stuff that I know will be helpful for some project later on and can then go back and read through to refresh my memory.

I use floccus to sync my bookmarks to my nextcloud. Especially on the phone its useful, since accessing my bookmarks in firefox for android is a hassle.

Still use pinboard which seems more than enough for me. But I would happily pay for a pinboard that has better search and more responsive customer service.

Honestly, since the first day I switched to Firefox I'm just saving to it's own bookmarks. Whenever I wanna check those websites I just open it either from my desktop or my laptop(s), since it's syncing in between my devices.

I don't know if there's much people using bookmarking tools, but to help you see another perspective, as a person who finds bookmarking tools not necessary I'd say it wouldn't worth your time to vibe code one. Also just for "vibe coding", be really really careful if you're gonna make it a "product" because you'll definitely face rough situations through it.

Yeah, otherwise I'd end up with 9000 tabs. I use firefox and make use of the tagging system there, it's nice.

Yes I still use bookmarks, though it's tempting to have chatgpt5 build me a memex so I can save whole pages and sites and mark them up to save in a journal instead.

Of course. I bookmark them using bookmarks in my browser. I have about 15k bookmarks now. I also save my session files so I have tabs with history too. For both bookmarks and tab session files I have perl scripts to process/search them.

Another shot at a bookmark manager is welcome.

The usual story is "I bookmarked 20,000 web pages over 3 years and then I realized I never looked at any of them!"

I built an "image sorter" which used to ingest image galleries using a bookmarklet which would queue the galleries to get crawled with a web crawler, I would then classify and rank the image galleries in an HTMX-based UI. I really do look at the images every day so it is successful in that sense. The web crawler started running into Cloudflare problems so now I save the whole page with the browser and have a Python script harvest the pages out of my Downloads folder.

Not really, I have some bookmarks in my toolbar from decades ago that still see the odd click, but mostly I just rely on history, ie "dev 461" gets me to our JIRA board with my usual filters, "github PROJECT" / "github PROJECT pulls" get me to the project or the pull requests.

In fact I've been using Shortcuts instead of bookmarks lately, as those will open on any Apple device in the default browser for the device, not limited to whatever browser you happened to bookmark them in.

I use tabs, and lots of them...

Yes, honestly I still do that! I know it's old school. But it works. easy to use, fast access and free, lool!

I rarely bookmark anything. If anything, my browser's history is adequate to find anything I need to pull back up, I can start typing in the address bad and it'll get suggested.

Extensively

I've been using Shaarli[1] for the past 15 years, and I'm very happy with it. The code base is small and stable enough (the official version hasn't got a single update over the past 12 years, even though the author is still using it daily[2]) you can easily tweak it to your tastes.

[1]: https://github.com/sebsauvage/Shaarli

[2]: https://sebsauvage.net/links/

I use an ever expanding text file, plus bookmarks. The textfile is #1 for me, and can live on various drives.