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WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

396 points by lelf 6y ago

Mennabah 6y ago
Is it coming to Safari anytime soon? Although I don't think it's mentioned in your roadmap
fudged71 6y ago
I'm excited for this resurgence of archiving, searching, highlighting, bookmarking, note-taking, etc
- donmcronald 6y ago
  I want a self-hosted version of something like this. I currently use historio.us, which is one of the only services I pay for, but I'd much rather have a good self hosted option. I've been looking for years.
  - anotheryou 6y ago
    This one stores locally (if you don't use sync)
  - rakoo 6y ago
    Maybe Archivebox (https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/) can suit your needs ? Archiving is what it does, but there's nothing built-in for searching
    - nikisweeting 6y ago
      The ArchiveBox wiki also has a list of many similar projects even if you don't even up using ArchiveBox itself: https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community#Web-Archiving-Projects https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...
      - donmcronald 6y ago
        I read through all of those a few days ago actually. It's a really awesome list. Thanks for publishing it. ArchiveBox 0.4 will probably be the first thing that has a chance of replacing my existing solution.
  - aryonoco 6y ago
    This stores locally, and if you want sync you can use use Dropbox or Google Drive or roll out your own with rsync and cron jobs. How can it be any more self hosted than this?
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Hey, I made historious! I'm glad you like it.
kstrauser 6y ago
My first impression was "oh, another Pinboard competitor" (which historically don't fare well). What's the elevator pitch for why I should use Memex instead of that?
- anotheryou 6y ago
  Full-text search across everything you have ever seen (not just bookmarked).
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    Ah, thanks! That's a good summary.
    - karlicoss 6y ago
      also, highlighting/annotations
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jtth 6y ago
    That doesn't seem like a feature.
jalopy 6y ago
Does it capture the web content I view? Or just index it to retrieve the web at it's original URL later?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- anotheryou 6y ago
  For full text search it has to save the text obviously, but right now you sadly can't retrieve it. It's on top of the roadmap though :) https://www.notion.so/Release-Notes-Roadmap-262a367f7a2a48ff8115d2c71f700c14 https://www.notion.so/Release-Notes-Roadmap-262a367f7a2a48ff...
rollinDyno 6y ago
Something I noticed when I use "Read Later" style applications to save pages is that I will, most of the time, forget about how I arrived at a certain page. This is important to me because it gives me the context to decide a perspective on the page. If I was able to save pages while also knowing where I found them and maybe make a comment about why I found it interesting, then I would be able to organize my knowledge in a way that mirrors my train of thought. Are there any tools capable of doing this?
- karlicoss 6y ago
  I'm working on a tool which can do exactly this (and it's only one of the features!): https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme Here's a link demonstrating the usecase you want (40 seconds video): https://karlicoss.github.io/promnesia-demos/how_did_i_get_here.webm https://karlicoss.github.io/promnesia-demos/how_did_i_get_he... I discovered Worldbrain Memex way into the development (unfortunately), but in the near future I will try to evaluate to which extent it's possible to mutually benefit, i.e. base Promnesia extension & backend on Worldbrain's, or contribute some of Promnesia's features to them (maybe even merge completely?)
  - rollinDyno 6y ago
    The webm file is broken
    - karlicoss 6y ago
      sigh.. thanks, it works in Firefox, but apparently not in Chrome. I added a link to mp4 version. upd: in case it would save someone else some pain in the future -- direct webm links don't work on raw.githubusercontent.com, but do work if you publish your repo as github pages -- then it ends up hosted on a proper CDN.
  - yewenjie 6y ago
    Big shoutout to karlicoss for doing amazing things in the Personal Knowledge Management space. Also, it would be great to see a Memex-to-Org tool from you.
avolcano 6y ago
The site is weirdly ambiguous about this but: I am assuming by "offline-first" they mean that the "full-text history capture" never leaves my device, right? Or does it get synced optionally? Or only synced to other devices I have? It's baffling to me that they put "privacy-centric" front and center and then do not in any way explain what that actually means.
- karlicoss 6y ago
  Yep, the sync is optional (and the only thing they take money for, which makes sense)
- severine 6y ago
  https://community.worldbrain.io/t/what-happens-with-my-private-data/45 https://community.worldbrain.io/t/what-happens-with-my-priva...
symplee 6y ago
Looks great. Would be awesome if it had a hook to easily generate Anki flashcards from text selection.
ollo 6y ago
Why should I use this instead of Zotero?
- egberts1 6y ago
  Because Zotero has no native App for iOS or Android.
wakkaflokka 6y ago
I keep wanting to use this because I love the idea, but the implementation last time I tried didn't seem to jive with me. I navigate the web with Tridactyl, and I think some of the keybindings were interfering - which would be my fault. With that being said - I love the idea, and will continue to check every so often on the status of the project :)
- anotheryou 6y ago
  I also disabled all keybindings and overlays and it can still be useful for search.
fastball 6y ago
What is WorldBrain?
- severine 6y ago
  More details: https://community.worldbrain.io/t/data-sovereignty-and-privacy-more-of-it-please/268/12 https://community.worldbrain.io/t/data-sovereignty-and-priva... https://medium.com/bettersharing/steward-ownership-is-capitalism-2-0-76a1c50a6d88 https://medium.com/bettersharing/steward-ownership-is-capita... edit: corrected 1st link
fit2rule 6y ago
This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can remember about the article, almost instantaneously. $ ls -l ~/PDFArchive/ | grep -i "bookmark" | grep -i "manage" | wc -l = I've seen 20 other bookmark management 'solution' articles in 20 years .. nothing beats print-to-PDF. Its just awesome.
- imperialdrive 6y ago
  Kudos - I'll be practicing this later today :)
- danielecook 6y ago
  What sorts of web pages do you do this for? What if the pdf version is difficult to read?
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    Every web page I'll ever want to refer to, ever again. There are no good reasons for exceptions to this technique, imho. If the PDF version is difficult to read - which it rarely is, by the way - all I need to do is open the PDF and use the links in the page header to go visit the site again - all the details about the page are still there in the PDF, links are still clickable, etc. And if its really important, and I've taken the time, before moving to my PDF Archive, to verify that the site is not readable due to some layout inconsistency in the conversion to PDF (I do sometimes suspect this with the fancier laid out pages), I Print-to-PDF again after enabling Reader mode/view (Safari/Firefox): problem solved. But really, there are very few web pages that don't survive the PDF conversion. And anyway, I mostly pipe the .PDF output through something like pdf2text for further grok/grep'ing...
    - cortesoft 6y ago
NikolaeVarius 6y ago
I guess this possibly competes with pocket/wallaby/similar? I see mozilla as a contributor.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
Wow, I have been looking for just this tool. First, the ability to highlight and save interesting passages on the web. Second, something to give me value from my own browsing history. Third, an honest, open, paid service that aspires to the vision of the original Memex. I really hope this succeeds.
carapace 6y ago
I tried this for a couple of months but the search results were disappointing. I think something like "Stealth" ( https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth ) will prove to be a better strategy.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Hmm, how could the results have been disappointing? It just searches for text, how bad can it be?
  - carapace 6y ago
    I would search for terms that I knew were on pages that should be indexed but they wouldn't be in the results list.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      I installed it yesterday and noticed that it doesn't actually index much. It should be, but it's not, the pages aren't added. If they are in the index, it finds them in a search, but very few pages are.
      - BlackForestBoy 6y ago
        Oli here from Memex. It may be that you have not touched the indexing preferences (which only index pages that are visited for more than 5 seconds) Is that the reason, or does it still not work?
        StavrosK 6y ago
        No, I changed everything (set it to 20 seconds), it still doesn't work. I stay on pages (here, for example) for minutes, and they don't get indexed. I have disabled the bar and hotkeys, if it matters.
greenice 6y ago
Does WorldBrain Memex save any data about the sites I bookmark? I‘ve been using Onenote for the past 10 years to bookmark or save websites. It had worked OK to share from mobile but my Onenote notebook is now approaching 10 GB in size. And I have a pretty bad experience with syncing as it doesn‘t reliably sync in the background if I don‘t regularly open the app on mobile (especially on iOS).
flower-giraffe 6y ago
This is an interesting perhaps meta-relevant topic for HN. How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere? How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades. I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxonomy, to a repository with full text search and spaced repetition reminder cards, the things I remember are those that I took the time to read. I suspect most people here has a comparable metric to share. Maybe the best bookmark repository is nul:
- nikivi 6y ago
  I post all my notes and bookmarks online. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge And access everything super fast too using tool I made. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind
- klenwell 6y ago
  > How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I do all the time. Behold. I don't have a particular refined process or taxonomy. Just Pinboard and tags. One tool I use to keep things circulating is a daily script that emails me 5 random bookmarks from my Pinboard account each morning. Stole the idea from this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451912 Run a local cron job (actually a local Jenkins job) and use this Python library: https://github.com/lionheart/pinboard.py https://github.com/lionheart/pinboard.py
- ORioN63 6y ago
  I've been fighting my ~3000 (~70% untagged) bookmarks for a while. Right now, I've gave up on silly tags like "Postgres" or "Python". Currently, I'm trying to adapt the bookmark concept into different uses cases. The main one is sessions, but I have a few others niche ones, like "read later" and "a tool a day". Honestly, my takeaway from managing my bookmarks, is that, snapshotting a session, is the closest thing I have to a "hot" start. I instantly recognize what I was working on and I remember why I opened/kept open those tabs.
dig1 6y ago
My tools of choice for advanced bookmarking and offline read: * org-mode [1]. * org-board [2] for offline archiving. * Org Capture [3] for getting links or text chunks from browser. * git repo for tracking history. With org-mode I can create really complex connections between articles and citations, add tags, have TODO lists and many more. To visualize things and connections, org-mind-map [4] can be useful. Because everything is text, grep, ripgrep, ag, xapian and other similar tools works without problems. I'm aware this setup isn't for everyone (you need to be Emacs user), but I still need to find proper alternative with this amount of flexibility, keeping everything in plain text format. [1] https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ [2] https://github.com/scallywag/org-board https://github.com/scallywag/org-board [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/org-capture/kkkjlfejijcjgjllecmnejhogpbcigdc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/org-capture/kkkjlf... [4] https://github.com/the-humanities/org-mind-map https://github.com/the-humanities/org-mind-map
- allarm 6y ago
  I didn’t know about the org-board, thanks.
- madballster 6y ago
  I have a similar setup for my note/bookmarking needs, I added abo-abo's org-download in case the page has an interesting image: https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download
- rukuu001 6y ago
  In the last week I’ve gone from using org-mode grudgingly in conjunction with a wiki, to just org-mode and realizing I’ll never be able to live without it again.
haaaris 6y ago
I'm currently building a similar tool, but for groups and teams. Would appreciate any feedback if anyone's keen on checking it out :) https://www.inverse.network/ https://www.inverse.network/
cparsons3000 6y ago
I've literally used over 10 bookmark managers in the last 10 years and Bookmark OS (https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com) is the only one that I've stuck with
- egberts1 6y ago
  Yes, HTML-only bookmark manager like BookmarkOS is very good especially if you used a disparate amount of platforms like Windows desktop PC, Linux laptop, and iOS Mobile.
ohlookabird 6y ago
I really like my self-hosted Wallabag for this. There are browser extensions for Firefox and Chromium (and possibly other) and works well on my Android phone and online. It's a nice layout and most websites work well with it. I use it both for bookmarking and as read-it-later tool. Kudos to the devs!
loughnane 6y ago
Is a good way to think about this as Memex = Evernote + Genius + Privacy?
valbaca 6y ago
I've been using Pocket for free since 2011: getpocket.com It's not great or perfect but it's good enough for "to read later" and keeping a running "grimoire" I've tried other methods: chrome bookmarks, evernote, plain-text, etc but nothing provides: 1. Ubiquity with just one login With Pocket, everywhere I browse I can add to pocket, including at work. I don't want to ever use my Google login at work b/c I don't want my work Chrome bookmarks (which are basically work-internal websites) to conflict with my personal ones. Pocket is available on my phone, iPad, browser, and work browser quickly and easily. 2. Has tags. I stick with about one tag per item. I don't need it to be fully tagged out, but just a general one. Typically by programming language or topic. One special tag is "someday" which is how I get very long items (like online books) out of my short "To Read" queue. 3. exports I haven't needed it but it's nice to know that I can easily export my bookmarks, with tags, to html. From there I can convert to something else if I want. I've tried GTD and other "universal" systems and my current system is a bit of a mess (mostly because of the work-life dichotomy), but at least my "save to read later" flow is simple: 1. Go to hacker news 2. send to pocket 3. when I've got time, scroll through my to-read and pick one that packs into the amount of time I have It does one thing and does it well enough for me.
- fao_ 6y ago
  > Has tags. You could build this into the command script that's currently the top post, I wrote a program for universal file-system supported tags: https://finnoleary.net/koios-tutorial.html https://finnoleary.net/koios-tutorial.html
pedalpete 6y ago
What do you guys think of their pricing? It appears more of a "here are some features you probably don't need, but if you want to give us a few bucks..." Curious if anyone has had success with this type of pricing model. We've tried it on my current app, and get a few bucks a day, but it doesn't compare to our B2B business. Thinking of something similar in a new app we're building.
rob-olmos 6y ago
Not sure if Memex has this, but one feature I like with Toby is that I can a save window as a "session" and it makes a "collection" of all the tabs. Works well since I do window-per-topic that I'll come back to later. I believe Toby lacks text search for the page's contents, so it's mainly just easier/better organization for bookmarks, and would be nice if the data wasn't only tied to their cloud, or if I could make an easy backup.
- kirubakaran 6y ago
  What do you think of this? : https://histre.com/blog/save-restore-tabs/ https://histre.com/blog/save-restore-tabs/ [1] You can save all the tabs into a Histre notebook. The advantages are: 1. It's a web app, so a window of tabs can be saved in Chrome and restored in Firefox, for example. 2. Searchable 3. Can be shared with your teams [1] Disclaimer: I'm the founder
  - mathfailure 6y ago
    It's a service, so it gets 'no' just for that reason.
nikisweeting 6y ago
There are a ton of tools that do similar things, check out: https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community#Web-Archiving-Projects https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...
abuiles 6y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ --- it's a non-profit trying to solve the same idea. They are actually trying to advance on the ideas of the w3c annotation's working group and do everything open source.
- yewenjie 6y ago
  It really frustrates me that its 2020 and they still don't have a real extension for Firefox, the only thing preventing me from regularly using it.
  - BlackForestBoy 6y ago
    We are about to develop a bi-directional integration with Hypothes.is and Memex together with the Hypothes.is team. (Oli here from WorldBrain.io)
    - yewenjie 6y ago
      That would be really nice.
vorpalhex 6y ago
Well done. Compelling free tier, reasonable paid upgrades that add features instead of removing limits and an actually really exciting product.
kasperset 6y ago
This somewhat reminds me of HistoryHound. Unfortunately, it is MacOS only. https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/ https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/
nishparadox 6y ago
I had used this for some time in the past (on and off), periodically. One caveat I found was it was taking a huge toll on my browser (often, I felt the lags). Not sure if that's the problem now or not. Eventually, I ended up not using it and started using other tools (specific tools for specific tasks).
- BlackForestBoy 6y ago
  Kind of a bummer that this trended one week too early - next week we'll publish a big release with performance, UX and stability improvements. Especially we focused on indexing and page load performance.
jgreg 6y ago
PSA: One of my favorite firefox features, you can type an asterisk (*) in the address bar and continue typing to quickly search your firefox bookmarks. Granted, it might not scale to a huge number of bookmarks as well as some other methods mentioned here.
methou 6y ago
I remember using this software last time, it is wayyyy~ too buggy, it stalls, crashes, and slows down the browser. Also that import feature is actually crawling the site, beware if you are using a proxy or something with rate limit.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  Is it still buggy? I had a similar experience, but it looks and feels a lot smoother and faster now.
  - BlackForestBoy 6y ago
    It's way better now but still some way to go! Kind of a bummer that this trended one week too early - next week we'll publish a big release with performance, UX and stability improvements.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      Been running it in the background since this thread came up. Everything is stable and fast so far. I’ll see what happens after I import my history tonight ;) But that is great to know, I’ll hold out for that update then, even if I have some problems. And I’m happy to see you finished premium, that didn’t exist the last time.
    - methou 6y ago
      That great to know! Visible performance and stability issues were the only things that hindering me from continue using memex, I just installed it and so far so good! Can't wait to see next week.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  That was my experience as well. I really gave it a good try for two days. After that, I got fed up and deleted it.
sneak 6y ago
When did it become acceptable to embed networked surveillance like Sentry into cryptographic tools? To me, that entirely defeats the purpose of end to end encryption. Whether the key is generated on the server and provided to you, or generated on the client and potentially uploaded to the server due to embedded defect surveillance: that's simply not end to end encryption.
yewenjie 6y ago
I have been using Memex for more than a year now. Here are the things that really annoy me - occasional freezing and sudden disappearance of your bookmarks - no real way to programmatically access your Memex database. I know they have released the storage backend, but the lack of helpful documentation is a deal-breaker. - lack of collaborative annotation (the way Hypothesis does) - only few results in search results!
- aaadult 6y ago
  the data is just in the folder u select when u choose local hard drive as backup location. and the format is quite friendly for programmatically accessing.
nikolay 6y ago
I was one of the first backers who paid for their lifetime subscription. Except it was nowhere to be found and my account was essentially "free". Nice way to treat your early adopters, guys!
- BlackForestBoy 6y ago
  Oli here from WorldBrain.io I am confused. We never offered lifetime subscriptions. However what we did is give people who supported us between 4 and 5 times the supporter amount in credits they can use to upgrade. We sent an email around to everyone at the end of last year. (You're the only "Nikolay" in our customer DB, so I gave it a check and you have tons of credits still left) The reason it was "free" for you at checkout is because the credits were applied. Hope that clarifies things.
tsp 6y ago
I have been using Pocket [0], Instapaper [1] and Pinboard [2] over the years. I am currently using Pocket and Pinboard in parallel: articles / websites that I want to read later are sent to Pocket (untagged), websites that I might want to get to back later are tagged and sent to Pinboard. While my archive on Pinboard works quite well I am very disappointed by the support. Either the developer does not answer at all or months later. Not acceptable for a paid service. While Memex looks interesting having no API makes it a pass for me (for now). [0] https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/ [1] https://www.instapaper.com/ https://www.instapaper.com/ [2] https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
- BlackForestBoy 6y ago
  Oli here from WorldBrain.io A bit of a timing issue here :) We are about to have a big release with lots of improvements, including an API, performance, UX and bug fixes. Our API will be served via Storex https://medium.com/@WorldBrain/storexhub-an-offline-first-open-source-zapier-f8841810fd9c https://medium.com/@WorldBrain/storexhub-an-offline-first-op...
  - reanimated 6y ago
    It would be great if we could change color of the highlights. On some pages, especially with dark modes, green doesn't work.
iamben 6y ago
About a month or so ago I moved to a new Mac. I had the option of porting over all my bookmarks, starting fresh, or sorting them out. I took a lazy Sunday and sorted through ~7000 bookmarks I'd accumulated in the 7 years I had the previous Mac. About 50% of the sites or pages were now offline. 45% were irrelevant to me, either because I was no longer interested, they'd been superseded by something better, or they were outdated code snippets or examples, etc. 3% I (finally) read or skimmed, none of these changed my life. 2% were useful sites, mostly collections of things (stock imagery, audio samples) I would struggle to find in Google now or I don't manually type in frequently. I added keywords to the titles (you can't tag in Chrome) and sorted them into folders. I was also a tab monster. I'd have ~150 or open at all times (thanks Great Suspender!) - usually things I wanted to read later or come back to. I drew a line - tabs get 48 hours and then they're closed. Websites only get bookmarked if they contain something likely to last and I'd struggle to find if I Googled again. Both the tabs and the bookmarks created unnecessary mental load. Every suspended tab and "read me later" bookmark became another weight around my neck that screamed "still haven't got around to me, eh? Fail!" Now I'm working to the "read it asap or act on it asap - or it's not something you _really_ wanted." I guess a kind of Marie Kondo for my head, which is really rather freeing. Perhaps Memex is a good middle ground. A chance to drag up the past as and when _my life_ is ready for it, without the future affecting the present. I'll give it a go.
egberts1 6y ago
Awful lot of different overhead for a server. What I am still waiting for is a nice single command (or Docker) to host this privately without the use of a 3rd-party go-between (even if it is E2E-secured. Closest thing I’ve found is Mozilla Sync but none of their mobile app are configurable to use your own server ... yet.
dangoljames 6y ago
This extension (Memex) flies wide of the mark. I won't elaborate beyond saying that as a tool it suffers technically from the constraints imposed by the operational context of browser extensions and as a business enterprise it's focus on revenue generation cripples it as an effective tool in the technical sense. Additionally, it lacks much of the functionality one anticipates in the most simple of tools of any abstraction, such as the ability to directly and conveniently edit previously committed atomic text. Also you guys' successful use of pdfs for offline preservation is intriguing and I find it interesting that it satisfies your needs, but I think it only half a solution. I need something that can periodically and passively digest my annotated bookmarks semantically, producing a pool of 'hot terms', deep search the web for them in the background, and bring to my attention things that meet a configurable 'level of interest'. Additionally I'd want such a system to be a core part of a personal research management tool that would integrate any content I might drop on it in the deliberate, overt sense as well.
Yizahi 6y ago
Me: Sees "Pricing" page in the contents. Middle click it to open in new tab to check what they want. Sees homepage again. Apparently bookmark extension site is above making proper links which can be bookmarked.
Yizahi 6y ago
Why does it need a metric ton of permissions? To everything - data, history, notifications etc.
qwerty456127 6y ago
For G-d's sake, please remove the confirmation request popping up every time I click to remove an entry. It drives me mad! Also please add full (not change-set) export.
jkmcf 6y ago
A feature I miss from an old, discarded read later service was browser search bar integration. It was very convenient searching from one place across multiple locations.
joyceschan 6y ago
The website is suspended by their host

396 points by lelf 6y ago

Mennabah 6y ago

Is it coming to Safari anytime soon? Although I don't think it's mentioned in your roadmap

fudged71 6y ago

I'm excited for this resurgence of archiving, searching, highlighting, bookmarking, note-taking, etc

donmcronald 6y ago
I want a self-hosted version of something like this. I currently use historio.us, which is one of the only services I pay for, but I'd much rather have a good self hosted option. I've been looking for years.
- anotheryou 6y ago
  This one stores locally (if you don't use sync)
- rakoo 6y ago
  Maybe Archivebox (https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/) can suit your needs ? Archiving is what it does, but there's nothing built-in for searching
  - nikisweeting 6y ago
    The ArchiveBox wiki also has a list of many similar projects even if you don't even up using ArchiveBox itself: https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community#Web-Archiving-Projects https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...
    - donmcronald 6y ago
      I read through all of those a few days ago actually. It's a really awesome list. Thanks for publishing it. ArchiveBox 0.4 will probably be the first thing that has a chance of replacing my existing solution.
- aryonoco 6y ago
  This stores locally, and if you want sync you can use use Dropbox or Google Drive or roll out your own with rsync and cron jobs. How can it be any more self hosted than this?
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Hey, I made historious! I'm glad you like it.

kstrauser 6y ago

My first impression was "oh, another Pinboard competitor" (which historically don't fare well). What's the elevator pitch for why I should use Memex instead of that?

anotheryou 6y ago
Full-text search across everything you have ever seen (not just bookmarked).
- kstrauser 6y ago
  Ah, thanks! That's a good summary.
  - karlicoss 6y ago
    also, highlighting/annotations
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jtth 6y ago
  That doesn't seem like a feature.

jalopy 6y ago

Does it capture the web content I view? Or just index it to retrieve the web at it's original URL later?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anotheryou 6y ago
For full text search it has to save the text obviously, but right now you sadly can't retrieve it. It's on top of the roadmap though :) https://www.notion.so/Release-Notes-Roadmap-262a367f7a2a48ff8115d2c71f700c14 https://www.notion.so/Release-Notes-Roadmap-262a367f7a2a48ff...

rollinDyno 6y ago

Something I noticed when I use "Read Later" style applications to save pages is that I will, most of the time, forget about how I arrived at a certain page. This is important to me because it gives me the context to decide a perspective on the page. If I was able to save pages while also knowing where I found them and maybe make a comment about why I found it interesting, then I would be able to organize my knowledge in a way that mirrors my train of thought. Are there any tools capable of doing this?

karlicoss 6y ago
I'm working on a tool which can do exactly this (and it's only one of the features!): https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme Here's a link demonstrating the usecase you want (40 seconds video): https://karlicoss.github.io/promnesia-demos/how_did_i_get_here.webm https://karlicoss.github.io/promnesia-demos/how_did_i_get_he... I discovered Worldbrain Memex way into the development (unfortunately), but in the near future I will try to evaluate to which extent it's possible to mutually benefit, i.e. base Promnesia extension & backend on Worldbrain's, or contribute some of Promnesia's features to them (maybe even merge completely?)
- rollinDyno 6y ago
  The webm file is broken
  - karlicoss 6y ago
    sigh.. thanks, it works in Firefox, but apparently not in Chrome. I added a link to mp4 version. upd: in case it would save someone else some pain in the future -- direct webm links don't work on raw.githubusercontent.com, but do work if you publish your repo as github pages -- then it ends up hosted on a proper CDN.
- yewenjie 6y ago
  Big shoutout to karlicoss for doing amazing things in the Personal Knowledge Management space. Also, it would be great to see a Memex-to-Org tool from you.

avolcano 6y ago

The site is weirdly ambiguous about this but: I am assuming by "offline-first" they mean that the "full-text history capture" never leaves my device, right? Or does it get synced optionally? Or only synced to other devices I have? It's baffling to me that they put "privacy-centric" front and center and then do not in any way explain what that actually means.

karlicoss 6y ago
Yep, the sync is optional (and the only thing they take money for, which makes sense)
severine 6y ago
https://community.worldbrain.io/t/what-happens-with-my-private-data/45 https://community.worldbrain.io/t/what-happens-with-my-priva...

symplee 6y ago

Looks great. Would be awesome if it had a hook to easily generate Anki flashcards from text selection.

ollo 6y ago

Why should I use this instead of Zotero?

egberts1 6y ago
Because Zotero has no native App for iOS or Android.

wakkaflokka 6y ago

I keep wanting to use this because I love the idea, but the implementation last time I tried didn't seem to jive with me. I navigate the web with Tridactyl, and I think some of the keybindings were interfering - which would be my fault. With that being said - I love the idea, and will continue to check every so often on the status of the project :)

anotheryou 6y ago
I also disabled all keybindings and overlays and it can still be useful for search.

fastball 6y ago

What is WorldBrain?

severine 6y ago
More details: https://community.worldbrain.io/t/data-sovereignty-and-privacy-more-of-it-please/268/12 https://community.worldbrain.io/t/data-sovereignty-and-priva... https://medium.com/bettersharing/steward-ownership-is-capitalism-2-0-76a1c50a6d88 https://medium.com/bettersharing/steward-ownership-is-capita... edit: corrected 1st link

fit2rule 6y ago

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can remember about the article, almost instantaneously. $ ls -l ~/PDFArchive/ | grep -i "bookmark" | grep -i "manage" | wc -l = I've seen 20 other bookmark management 'solution' articles in 20 years .. nothing beats print-to-PDF. Its just awesome.

imperialdrive 6y ago
Kudos - I'll be practicing this later today :)
danielecook 6y ago
What sorts of web pages do you do this for? What if the pdf version is difficult to read?
- fit2rule 6y ago
  Every web page I'll ever want to refer to, ever again. There are no good reasons for exceptions to this technique, imho. If the PDF version is difficult to read - which it rarely is, by the way - all I need to do is open the PDF and use the links in the page header to go visit the site again - all the details about the page are still there in the PDF, links are still clickable, etc. And if its really important, and I've taken the time, before moving to my PDF Archive, to verify that the site is not readable due to some layout inconsistency in the conversion to PDF (I do sometimes suspect this with the fancier laid out pages), I Print-to-PDF again after enabling Reader mode/view (Safari/Firefox): problem solved. But really, there are very few web pages that don't survive the PDF conversion. And anyway, I mostly pipe the .PDF output through something like pdf2text for further grok/grep'ing...
  - cortesoft 6y ago

NikolaeVarius 6y ago

I guess this possibly competes with pocket/wallaby/similar? I see mozilla as a contributor.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

Wow, I have been looking for just this tool. First, the ability to highlight and save interesting passages on the web. Second, something to give me value from my own browsing history. Third, an honest, open, paid service that aspires to the vision of the original Memex. I really hope this succeeds.

carapace 6y ago

I tried this for a couple of months but the search results were disappointing. I think something like "Stealth" ( https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth ) will prove to be a better strategy.

StavrosK 6y ago
Hmm, how could the results have been disappointing? It just searches for text, how bad can it be?
- carapace 6y ago
  I would search for terms that I knew were on pages that should be indexed but they wouldn't be in the results list.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    I installed it yesterday and noticed that it doesn't actually index much. It should be, but it's not, the pages aren't added. If they are in the index, it finds them in a search, but very few pages are.
    - BlackForestBoy 6y ago
      Oli here from Memex. It may be that you have not touched the indexing preferences (which only index pages that are visited for more than 5 seconds) Is that the reason, or does it still not work?
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        No, I changed everything (set it to 20 seconds), it still doesn't work. I stay on pages (here, for example) for minutes, and they don't get indexed. I have disabled the bar and hotkeys, if it matters.

greenice 6y ago

Does WorldBrain Memex save any data about the sites I bookmark? I‘ve been using Onenote for the past 10 years to bookmark or save websites. It had worked OK to share from mobile but my Onenote notebook is now approaching 10 GB in size. And I have a pretty bad experience with syncing as it doesn‘t reliably sync in the background if I don‘t regularly open the app on mobile (especially on iOS).

flower-giraffe 6y ago

This is an interesting perhaps meta-relevant topic for HN. How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere? How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades. I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxonomy, to a repository with full text search and spaced repetition reminder cards, the things I remember are those that I took the time to read. I suspect most people here has a comparable metric to share. Maybe the best bookmark repository is nul:

nikivi 6y ago
I post all my notes and bookmarks online. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge And access everything super fast too using tool I made. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind
klenwell 6y ago
> How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I do all the time. Behold. I don't have a particular refined process or taxonomy. Just Pinboard and tags. One tool I use to keep things circulating is a daily script that emails me 5 random bookmarks from my Pinboard account each morning. Stole the idea from this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451912 Run a local cron job (actually a local Jenkins job) and use this Python library: https://github.com/lionheart/pinboard.py https://github.com/lionheart/pinboard.py
ORioN63 6y ago
I've been fighting my ~3000 (~70% untagged) bookmarks for a while. Right now, I've gave up on silly tags like "Postgres" or "Python". Currently, I'm trying to adapt the bookmark concept into different uses cases. The main one is sessions, but I have a few others niche ones, like "read later" and "a tool a day". Honestly, my takeaway from managing my bookmarks, is that, snapshotting a session, is the closest thing I have to a "hot" start. I instantly recognize what I was working on and I remember why I opened/kept open those tabs.

dig1 6y ago

My tools of choice for advanced bookmarking and offline read: * org-mode [1]. * org-board [2] for offline archiving. * Org Capture [3] for getting links or text chunks from browser. * git repo for tracking history. With org-mode I can create really complex connections between articles and citations, add tags, have TODO lists and many more. To visualize things and connections, org-mind-map [4] can be useful. Because everything is text, grep, ripgrep, ag, xapian and other similar tools works without problems. I'm aware this setup isn't for everyone (you need to be Emacs user), but I still need to find proper alternative with this amount of flexibility, keeping everything in plain text format. [1] https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ [2] https://github.com/scallywag/org-board https://github.com/scallywag/org-board [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/org-capture/kkkjlfejijcjgjllecmnejhogpbcigdc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/org-capture/kkkjlf... [4] https://github.com/the-humanities/org-mind-map https://github.com/the-humanities/org-mind-map

allarm 6y ago
I didn’t know about the org-board, thanks.
madballster 6y ago
I have a similar setup for my note/bookmarking needs, I added abo-abo's org-download in case the page has an interesting image: https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download
rukuu001 6y ago
In the last week I’ve gone from using org-mode grudgingly in conjunction with a wiki, to just org-mode and realizing I’ll never be able to live without it again.

haaaris 6y ago

I'm currently building a similar tool, but for groups and teams. Would appreciate any feedback if anyone's keen on checking it out :) https://www.inverse.network/ https://www.inverse.network/

cparsons3000 6y ago

I've literally used over 10 bookmark managers in the last 10 years and Bookmark OS (https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com) is the only one that I've stuck with

egberts1 6y ago
Yes, HTML-only bookmark manager like BookmarkOS is very good especially if you used a disparate amount of platforms like Windows desktop PC, Linux laptop, and iOS Mobile.

ohlookabird 6y ago

I really like my self-hosted Wallabag for this. There are browser extensions for Firefox and Chromium (and possibly other) and works well on my Android phone and online. It's a nice layout and most websites work well with it. I use it both for bookmarking and as read-it-later tool. Kudos to the devs!

loughnane 6y ago

Is a good way to think about this as Memex = Evernote + Genius + Privacy?

valbaca 6y ago

I've been using Pocket for free since 2011: getpocket.com It's not great or perfect but it's good enough for "to read later" and keeping a running "grimoire" I've tried other methods: chrome bookmarks, evernote, plain-text, etc but nothing provides: 1. Ubiquity with just one login With Pocket, everywhere I browse I can add to pocket, including at work. I don't want to ever use my Google login at work b/c I don't want my work Chrome bookmarks (which are basically work-internal websites) to conflict with my personal ones. Pocket is available on my phone, iPad, browser, and work browser quickly and easily. 2. Has tags. I stick with about one tag per item. I don't need it to be fully tagged out, but just a general one. Typically by programming language or topic. One special tag is "someday" which is how I get very long items (like online books) out of my short "To Read" queue. 3. exports I haven't needed it but it's nice to know that I can easily export my bookmarks, with tags, to html. From there I can convert to something else if I want. I've tried GTD and other "universal" systems and my current system is a bit of a mess (mostly because of the work-life dichotomy), but at least my "save to read later" flow is simple: 1. Go to hacker news 2. send to pocket 3. when I've got time, scroll through my to-read and pick one that packs into the amount of time I have It does one thing and does it well enough for me.

fao_ 6y ago
> Has tags. You could build this into the command script that's currently the top post, I wrote a program for universal file-system supported tags: https://finnoleary.net/koios-tutorial.html https://finnoleary.net/koios-tutorial.html

pedalpete 6y ago

What do you guys think of their pricing? It appears more of a "here are some features you probably don't need, but if you want to give us a few bucks..." Curious if anyone has had success with this type of pricing model. We've tried it on my current app, and get a few bucks a day, but it doesn't compare to our B2B business. Thinking of something similar in a new app we're building.

rob-olmos 6y ago

Not sure if Memex has this, but one feature I like with Toby is that I can a save window as a "session" and it makes a "collection" of all the tabs. Works well since I do window-per-topic that I'll come back to later. I believe Toby lacks text search for the page's contents, so it's mainly just easier/better organization for bookmarks, and would be nice if the data wasn't only tied to their cloud, or if I could make an easy backup.

kirubakaran 6y ago
What do you think of this? : https://histre.com/blog/save-restore-tabs/ https://histre.com/blog/save-restore-tabs/ [1] You can save all the tabs into a Histre notebook. The advantages are: 1. It's a web app, so a window of tabs can be saved in Chrome and restored in Firefox, for example. 2. Searchable 3. Can be shared with your teams [1] Disclaimer: I'm the founder
- mathfailure 6y ago
  It's a service, so it gets 'no' just for that reason.

nikisweeting 6y ago

There are a ton of tools that do similar things, check out: https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community#Web-Archiving-Projects https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...

abuiles 6y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ --- it's a non-profit trying to solve the same idea. They are actually trying to advance on the ideas of the w3c annotation's working group and do everything open source.

yewenjie 6y ago
It really frustrates me that its 2020 and they still don't have a real extension for Firefox, the only thing preventing me from regularly using it.
- BlackForestBoy 6y ago
  We are about to develop a bi-directional integration with Hypothes.is and Memex together with the Hypothes.is team. (Oli here from WorldBrain.io)
  - yewenjie 6y ago
    That would be really nice.

vorpalhex 6y ago

Well done. Compelling free tier, reasonable paid upgrades that add features instead of removing limits and an actually really exciting product.

kasperset 6y ago

This somewhat reminds me of HistoryHound. Unfortunately, it is MacOS only. https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/ https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/

nishparadox 6y ago

I had used this for some time in the past (on and off), periodically. One caveat I found was it was taking a huge toll on my browser (often, I felt the lags). Not sure if that's the problem now or not. Eventually, I ended up not using it and started using other tools (specific tools for specific tasks).

BlackForestBoy 6y ago
Kind of a bummer that this trended one week too early - next week we'll publish a big release with performance, UX and stability improvements. Especially we focused on indexing and page load performance.

jgreg 6y ago

PSA: One of my favorite firefox features, you can type an asterisk (*) in the address bar and continue typing to quickly search your firefox bookmarks. Granted, it might not scale to a huge number of bookmarks as well as some other methods mentioned here.

methou 6y ago

I remember using this software last time, it is wayyyy~ too buggy, it stalls, crashes, and slows down the browser. Also that import feature is actually crawling the site, beware if you are using a proxy or something with rate limit.

Semaphor 6y ago
Is it still buggy? I had a similar experience, but it looks and feels a lot smoother and faster now.
- BlackForestBoy 6y ago
  It's way better now but still some way to go! Kind of a bummer that this trended one week too early - next week we'll publish a big release with performance, UX and stability improvements.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    Been running it in the background since this thread came up. Everything is stable and fast so far. I’ll see what happens after I import my history tonight ;) But that is great to know, I’ll hold out for that update then, even if I have some problems. And I’m happy to see you finished premium, that didn’t exist the last time.
  - methou 6y ago
    That great to know! Visible performance and stability issues were the only things that hindering me from continue using memex, I just installed it and so far so good! Can't wait to see next week.
kilroy123 6y ago
That was my experience as well. I really gave it a good try for two days. After that, I got fed up and deleted it.

sneak 6y ago

When did it become acceptable to embed networked surveillance like Sentry into cryptographic tools? To me, that entirely defeats the purpose of end to end encryption. Whether the key is generated on the server and provided to you, or generated on the client and potentially uploaded to the server due to embedded defect surveillance: that's simply not end to end encryption.

yewenjie 6y ago

I have been using Memex for more than a year now. Here are the things that really annoy me - occasional freezing and sudden disappearance of your bookmarks - no real way to programmatically access your Memex database. I know they have released the storage backend, but the lack of helpful documentation is a deal-breaker. - lack of collaborative annotation (the way Hypothesis does) - only few results in search results!

aaadult 6y ago
the data is just in the folder u select when u choose local hard drive as backup location. and the format is quite friendly for programmatically accessing.

nikolay 6y ago

I was one of the first backers who paid for their lifetime subscription. Except it was nowhere to be found and my account was essentially "free". Nice way to treat your early adopters, guys!

BlackForestBoy 6y ago
Oli here from WorldBrain.io I am confused. We never offered lifetime subscriptions. However what we did is give people who supported us between 4 and 5 times the supporter amount in credits they can use to upgrade. We sent an email around to everyone at the end of last year. (You're the only "Nikolay" in our customer DB, so I gave it a check and you have tons of credits still left) The reason it was "free" for you at checkout is because the credits were applied. Hope that clarifies things.

tsp 6y ago

I have been using Pocket [0], Instapaper [1] and Pinboard [2] over the years. I am currently using Pocket and Pinboard in parallel: articles / websites that I want to read later are sent to Pocket (untagged), websites that I might want to get to back later are tagged and sent to Pinboard. While my archive on Pinboard works quite well I am very disappointed by the support. Either the developer does not answer at all or months later. Not acceptable for a paid service. While Memex looks interesting having no API makes it a pass for me (for now). [0] https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/ [1] https://www.instapaper.com/ https://www.instapaper.com/ [2] https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/

BlackForestBoy 6y ago
Oli here from WorldBrain.io A bit of a timing issue here :) We are about to have a big release with lots of improvements, including an API, performance, UX and bug fixes. Our API will be served via Storex https://medium.com/@WorldBrain/storexhub-an-offline-first-open-source-zapier-f8841810fd9c https://medium.com/@WorldBrain/storexhub-an-offline-first-op...
- reanimated 6y ago
  It would be great if we could change color of the highlights. On some pages, especially with dark modes, green doesn't work.

iamben 6y ago

About a month or so ago I moved to a new Mac. I had the option of porting over all my bookmarks, starting fresh, or sorting them out. I took a lazy Sunday and sorted through ~7000 bookmarks I'd accumulated in the 7 years I had the previous Mac. About 50% of the sites or pages were now offline. 45% were irrelevant to me, either because I was no longer interested, they'd been superseded by something better, or they were outdated code snippets or examples, etc. 3% I (finally) read or skimmed, none of these changed my life. 2% were useful sites, mostly collections of things (stock imagery, audio samples) I would struggle to find in Google now or I don't manually type in frequently. I added keywords to the titles (you can't tag in Chrome) and sorted them into folders. I was also a tab monster. I'd have ~150 or open at all times (thanks Great Suspender!) - usually things I wanted to read later or come back to. I drew a line - tabs get 48 hours and then they're closed. Websites only get bookmarked if they contain something likely to last and I'd struggle to find if I Googled again. Both the tabs and the bookmarks created unnecessary mental load. Every suspended tab and "read me later" bookmark became another weight around my neck that screamed "still haven't got around to me, eh? Fail!" Now I'm working to the "read it asap or act on it asap - or it's not something you _really_ wanted." I guess a kind of Marie Kondo for my head, which is really rather freeing. Perhaps Memex is a good middle ground. A chance to drag up the past as and when _my life_ is ready for it, without the future affecting the present. I'll give it a go.

egberts1 6y ago

Awful lot of different overhead for a server. What I am still waiting for is a nice single command (or Docker) to host this privately without the use of a 3rd-party go-between (even if it is E2E-secured. Closest thing I’ve found is Mozilla Sync but none of their mobile app are configurable to use your own server ... yet.

dangoljames 6y ago

This extension (Memex) flies wide of the mark. I won't elaborate beyond saying that as a tool it suffers technically from the constraints imposed by the operational context of browser extensions and as a business enterprise it's focus on revenue generation cripples it as an effective tool in the technical sense. Additionally, it lacks much of the functionality one anticipates in the most simple of tools of any abstraction, such as the ability to directly and conveniently edit previously committed atomic text. Also you guys' successful use of pdfs for offline preservation is intriguing and I find it interesting that it satisfies your needs, but I think it only half a solution. I need something that can periodically and passively digest my annotated bookmarks semantically, producing a pool of 'hot terms', deep search the web for them in the background, and bring to my attention things that meet a configurable 'level of interest'. Additionally I'd want such a system to be a core part of a personal research management tool that would integrate any content I might drop on it in the deliberate, overt sense as well.

Yizahi 6y ago

Me: Sees "Pricing" page in the contents. Middle click it to open in new tab to check what they want. Sees homepage again. Apparently bookmark extension site is above making proper links which can be bookmarked.

Yizahi 6y ago

Why does it need a metric ton of permissions? To everything - data, history, notifications etc.

qwerty456127 6y ago

For G-d's sake, please remove the confirmation request popping up every time I click to remove an entry. It drives me mad! Also please add full (not change-set) export.

jkmcf 6y ago

A feature I miss from an old, discarded read later service was browser search bar integration. It was very convenient searching from one place across multiple locations.

joyceschan 6y ago

The website is suspended by their host