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Show HN: WebCrate – an open-source social bookmarking tool

110 points by betahuhn 5y ago

betahuhn 5y ago
Hey fellow internet users! I always got frustrated with existing bookmarking tools as they were either too clunky to use or had way too many features I didn't need. Until I decided to just build my own! WebCrate allows you to organize links, articles and more from around the web into collections called crates. You can share the crates with anyone and since each user gets their own instance of WebCrate in their own 'personal cloud' thanks to Deta Space, you can subscribe to other users crates and view their links right from your dashboard. Deta Space made it really easy for me as dev to build something like WebCrate quickly and it's also awesome for users. The app keeps running even if I disappear and hosting, auth etc. is all handled for me. For the nerds, I built WebCrate with Nuxt and ExpressJS and it uses Deta included NoSQL database. You can learn more about WebCrate at http://webcrate.app http://webcrate.app or install it directly on Deta Space (https://deta.space/discovery/webcrate https://deta.space/discovery/webcrate)! Let me know what you think (WebCrate is OSS, so you can also contribute) and I hope you find it useful!
fouc 5y ago
Webcrate is a great name, however the "crate" term strongly implies archival in this context to me. So as a user, I would actually assume that it takes an archive/snapshot of every website that I bookmark. The website doesn't seem to indicate it can do this?
- spinax 5y ago
  For me, "crate" is now associated with anything rust (and I'm neither a rust person or a programmer) - if I see crate in relation to tech, "it has something to do with rust."
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Interesting, I'll forever associate crates with vinyl records and DJing.. and I am a programmer, and not a DJ.. I guess context matters! ;-)
    - spinax 5y ago
      I'm with you! It's possible that at one time I thought as you (also being a music fan), but in the past 5 (?) years you can't trip but to find someone talking about rust in the tech spaces. Not only context, but era (point in time?) as well.
    - betahuhn 5y ago
      Funny how it means completely different things to different people. As a 18 year old I would never think of vinyl records when hearing "crates" :D
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Nope, not at this time. You can only store the URL itself in a "crate". Glad you like the name though!
- riffic 5y ago
  lol, this wouldn't be an HN thread without people bikeshedding over an app's name, would it?
  - fouc 5y ago
    The programmer's curse - naming things. "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."
looperhacks 5y ago
Is there any supported way to run it on a private server?
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Not out of the box no. You could fork and modify it, but that would take a lot of work. Can't recommend Deta Space enough though, it is kind of like self-hosting it without managing an actual server!
  - mynameismon 5y ago
    Is there a pricing plan for it? I can't seem to find one, and I prefer knowing what am I signing up for upfront.
    - betahuhn 5y ago
      Space (and WebCrate) are currently free! Even if they charge something for it in the future, the version of WebCrate you install today will always be free. On Deta Space updates are also opt-in, you choose when and if you want to update WebCrate.
      - vorpalhex 5y ago
        How is the service currently being funded?
        betahuhn 5y ago
        WebCrate is free since I as a dev don't run any servers and the data/compute lives with the users. I don't have any operational costs essentially. Deta Space is just getting started -- their plan is to offer payments and take a percentage for paid apps.
      - mynameismon 5y ago
        Thanks!
wazoox 5y ago
First, it's not self-hosted if it's not running on my computer (or eventually my private cloud). Second it seems like it doesn't snapshot the web pages? That's the killer feature that made me use Zotero, though it's big, ugly and clunky. I was tired of getting broken links or free articles that later required payment to be read again. I was quite happy with Instapaper, but annoyed by the not "self-hosted" part.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Check out ArchiveBox. Not as much of a bookmark manager but great for archiving pages.
- gildas 5y ago
  SingleFile [1] has some basic options allowing you to archive pages you add in your bookmarks. [1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
  - wazoox 5y ago
    Good job :)
res0nat0r 5y ago
I've been burned at least 3-4x now by bookmark sites shutting down, I just stick with Buku now: https://github.com/jarun/buku https://github.com/jarun/buku Local, text/cli based, sqlite.
- cyberge99 5y ago
  Agreed. I use buku and bukuserver because I can view bookmarks on my terminal/cli in addition to the browser page. Bookmark management is in a bad state of affairs. If I'm on my phone or misc. browser, I use Pocket. I then use 'puku' to sync my Pocket urls into buku (with tags). I use bukubrow for Firefox as an extension. I wish there was a better way, but for now it works. If anyone can write an iPhone/Android app, I'd be open to collaborate on project that could optimize bookmark management. A great product would be: browser independent extensions, cli tool, db backend, os independent, self-hosted (with option for cloud) and no requirement for a web interface. Just my .02 cents.
  - tconfrey 5y ago
    @cyberge99 check out BrainTool[1]. Its a Chromium extension that allows you to capture bookmarks and notes into a hierarchical topic tree thats stored in an org-mode syntax plain text file editable w emacs or any org editor (incl Orgzly on Android). It's not browser dependent for capture and navigation (not sure how it could be) but otherwise checks your boxes. [1] https://braintool.org/2021/08/25/Managing-your-Browser-with-BrainTool.html https://braintool.org/2021/08/25/Managing-your-Browser-with-...
hk1337 5y ago
Can this import .webloc and .url files? If there's something I want to keep, I will normally just drag the url over to my desktop when then saves it as one of those files. I don't have a toolbar showing in my browser and trying to hunt for the link or button to save it is more work than just dragging the url to the desktop.
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Not at moment no. You can only add links via the browser extensions and the dashboard. The extension supports an omnibox though so you can just type "wc" in your address bar, press tab and everything after that will be added as a URL to your WebCrate instance.
larrywright 5y ago
Neat product! I wanted to point out a couple of typos on the landing page: “Subscribe directly to another users WebCrate instace“ “Stays running even if the we disappear.” You might want to use a tool like Grammarly to help tighten up the marketing copy (or just pay a copywriter - you can probably even find someone at your university to do it for cheap). Not a criticism, just a suggestion.
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Whoops! Thanks so much for pointing them out! Thought I fixed all the typos, but some always get through! Grammarly might be a good solution, thanks :D
  - riffic 5y ago
    There's also a couple typos here: > Descentralized > Subscribe directly to another users WebCrate instace btw, how have you implemented interoperability?
    - betahuhn 5y ago
      Thanks, fixed! Between WebCrate instances? Thanks to Deta Space each instance has its own domain so it is reachable directly without a gateway or central server. The instance then exposes a public API which another instance and the client can access to get the required data.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  I would strongly discourage use of Grammarly: It's essentially a keylogger which uploads everything you type to their cloud service, and there is really no guarantee of privacy or ability to delete that data.
  - betahuhn 5y ago
    Good to know, thanks! I'm currently using Microsoft's Editor extension. Do you have any good alternatives?
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Deta Space appears to be very lacking in the product details department. I see a comment saying you can't self-host it, so it has to be on Deta's cloud, or can you even bring your own cloud provider? Is there any technical/security guarantee's to Deta's privacy claims? For one, a casual reading of their privacy page suggests they integrate a half dozen analytics (aka monitoring) tools including Google Analytics.
- riffic 5y ago
  from the looks of it, I assume Deta is some sort of PaaS, and aims to be a hybrid between Heroku and Glitch. It's an interesting space to be in, but the product's maturity leaves a lot to be desired. If you have concerns you should probably just be using Heroku or your own homegrown solution in IaaS/Bare Metal.
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    Well, the interesting thing is the developer experience seems to be very much like Sandstorm.io: "Publishing on Space allowed me to act like I was building this app for one person; I didn't have to worry about authentication" But it doesn't seem to provide any real description of technical justifications to claim Deta provides "privacy".
    - abdelhai 5y ago
      We give every app instance it's own server (VM) and database. It is completely isolated from all other instances of the same app. The developer has no access to your app instances or their data. Take a look at our sister product for the technical details "Deta Cloud" (deta.sh) We don't have much information on Space as we're still in the alpha stage.
  - abdelhai 5y ago
    Deta Space is still in developer alpha. We have a long way to go! Deta Cloud (deta.sh) is a PaaS like Heroku. Deta Space (deta.space) on the other hand is something new we call the "personal cloud". We will announce more soon.
DerekBickerton 5y ago
I use Pinboard for a cloud-based solution to bookmarking, and I export my Pinboard bookmark collection to an on-premises local PC location every 4 months or so, in-case Pinboard's servers are somehow destroyed (which is unlikely, but still possible). All my browser bookmarks accumulate to staggering volumes after each year, and then I simply prune the cruft, or low-quality bookmarks and curate a list of all the best ones, all using Firefox's bookmark library, which is an underestimated tool and enormously useful for organizing bookmarks. I typically use Firefox's bookmarks export feature that generates a HTML file that I can then browse at my leisure at any time and create a sort of 'master list' of bookmarks that I can then backup in Pinboard, or other cloud services to refer back to at any time.
selftemp 5y ago
As someone with over 2000+ bookmarks organized under 30+ folders on Google bookmarks, I've been looking for a self-hosted bookmarking tool with a nice UI that can run on my home server and is easily available across all platforms and devices for a while. This looks like a great start but I wouldn't call it self-hosted though, I'm more than happy to pay a nominal one time fee for a docker deployable image version of this.
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I can now see why not everyone has the same understanding of "self-hosted", which is totally okay! I am not planning on providing a version of WebCrate which can be run on any server any time soon. WebCrate uses services provided by Deta (like Deta Base for the database) internally and thus can't be moved to a docker image without a rewrite of the backend. I hope you understand and may consider giving Deta Space/WebCrate a try in the future!
dang 5y ago
The word 'self-hosted' is like 'open source' in that it leads to tons of distracting objections when people disagree about what it ought to mean. Since that's been happening a lot in this thread, the easiest thing is to take the term out of the title, and thus (hopefully) the issue off the table. Let's stick to discussing the project now!
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Thanks, didn't expect so much backlash about the term!
  - ohyeshedid 5y ago
    That's because self-hosted implies choice of where it's run; you don't offer that.
    - dang 5y ago
      Please don't start again :)
Saris 5y ago
This looks great, but there's no chance I'm going to use it on this detaspace service, since their website doesn't even explain what it does.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pickledish 5y ago
> Deta Space made it really easy for me as dev to build something like WebCrate quickly and it's also awesome for users. The app keeps running even if I disappear and hosting, auth etc. is all handled for me Ah yeah, love the concept, I had similar goals in mind when making Cardi (although I wasn't aware of many options at the time for putting data in control of the user -- I ended up just having people log in with AWS access keys and it stores data in DynamoDB, which is weird but has actually been working pretty well so far). https://github.com/pickledish/cardi https://github.com/pickledish/cardi Deta seems really interesting, looking forward to seeing where it goes from here! Would love more/better options in this space.
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Yeah it's an awesome concept! Cardi looks great too! Might be worth to see if you can port it to Space, would make it easier for non-tech people to use it!
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Give me Docker or give me death.
garyfirestorm 5y ago
Can someone recommend a truly self hosted solution? I too use pinboard but I would like to host on my raspi or something
- sissbruecker 5y ago
  I'm the author of linkding (1), an open-source, self-hosted bookmark manager that is similar to Pinboard, minus the social features. It uses Docker for deployments, SQLite as database and runs on Raspberry Pis. There are many other solutions in the self-hosted space, such as Shiori or LinkAce. 1: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
ibdf 5y ago
This is the second project I see here on Deta Space but I dont exactly follow what Deta Space is... is it a cloud service that hosts the app for you, under your account? I did not sign-up because I didn't see any pricing page. Then there's Deta Cloud, which has pricing, but it's all so unclear as to what I am signing up for.

110 points by betahuhn 5y ago

Hey fellow internet users! I always got frustrated with existing bookmarking tools as they were either too clunky to use or had way too many features I didn't need. Until I decided to just build my own! WebCrate allows you to organize links, articles and more from around the web into collections called crates. You can share the crates with anyone and since each user gets their own instance of WebCrate in their own 'personal cloud' thanks to Deta Space, you can subscribe to other users crates and view their links right from your dashboard. Deta Space made it really easy for me as dev to build something like WebCrate quickly and it's also awesome for users. The app keeps running even if I disappear and hosting, auth etc. is all handled for me. For the nerds, I built WebCrate with Nuxt and ExpressJS and it uses Deta included NoSQL database. You can learn more about WebCrate at http://webcrate.app http://webcrate.app or install it directly on Deta Space (https://deta.space/discovery/webcrate https://deta.space/discovery/webcrate)! Let me know what you think (WebCrate is OSS, so you can also contribute) and I hope you find it useful!

fouc 5y ago

Webcrate is a great name, however the "crate" term strongly implies archival in this context to me. So as a user, I would actually assume that it takes an archive/snapshot of every website that I bookmark. The website doesn't seem to indicate it can do this?

spinax 5y ago
For me, "crate" is now associated with anything rust (and I'm neither a rust person or a programmer) - if I see crate in relation to tech, "it has something to do with rust."
- sbarre 5y ago
  Interesting, I'll forever associate crates with vinyl records and DJing.. and I am a programmer, and not a DJ.. I guess context matters! ;-)
  - spinax 5y ago
    I'm with you! It's possible that at one time I thought as you (also being a music fan), but in the past 5 (?) years you can't trip but to find someone talking about rust in the tech spaces. Not only context, but era (point in time?) as well.
  - betahuhn 5y ago
    Funny how it means completely different things to different people. As a 18 year old I would never think of vinyl records when hearing "crates" :D
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
betahuhn 5y ago
Nope, not at this time. You can only store the URL itself in a "crate". Glad you like the name though!
riffic 5y ago
lol, this wouldn't be an HN thread without people bikeshedding over an app's name, would it?
- fouc 5y ago
  The programmer's curse - naming things. "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."

looperhacks 5y ago

Is there any supported way to run it on a private server?

betahuhn 5y ago
Not out of the box no. You could fork and modify it, but that would take a lot of work. Can't recommend Deta Space enough though, it is kind of like self-hosting it without managing an actual server!
- mynameismon 5y ago
  Is there a pricing plan for it? I can't seem to find one, and I prefer knowing what am I signing up for upfront.
  - betahuhn 5y ago
    Space (and WebCrate) are currently free! Even if they charge something for it in the future, the version of WebCrate you install today will always be free. On Deta Space updates are also opt-in, you choose when and if you want to update WebCrate.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      How is the service currently being funded?
      - betahuhn 5y ago
        WebCrate is free since I as a dev don't run any servers and the data/compute lives with the users. I don't have any operational costs essentially. Deta Space is just getting started -- their plan is to offer payments and take a percentage for paid apps.
    - mynameismon 5y ago
      Thanks!

wazoox 5y ago

First, it's not self-hosted if it's not running on my computer (or eventually my private cloud). Second it seems like it doesn't snapshot the web pages? That's the killer feature that made me use Zotero, though it's big, ugly and clunky. I was tired of getting broken links or free articles that later required payment to be read again. I was quite happy with Instapaper, but annoyed by the not "self-hosted" part.

vorpalhex 5y ago
Check out ArchiveBox. Not as much of a bookmark manager but great for archiving pages.
gildas 5y ago
SingleFile [1] has some basic options allowing you to archive pages you add in your bookmarks. [1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
- wazoox 5y ago
  Good job :)

res0nat0r 5y ago

I've been burned at least 3-4x now by bookmark sites shutting down, I just stick with Buku now: https://github.com/jarun/buku https://github.com/jarun/buku Local, text/cli based, sqlite.

cyberge99 5y ago
Agreed. I use buku and bukuserver because I can view bookmarks on my terminal/cli in addition to the browser page. Bookmark management is in a bad state of affairs. If I'm on my phone or misc. browser, I use Pocket. I then use 'puku' to sync my Pocket urls into buku (with tags). I use bukubrow for Firefox as an extension. I wish there was a better way, but for now it works. If anyone can write an iPhone/Android app, I'd be open to collaborate on project that could optimize bookmark management. A great product would be: browser independent extensions, cli tool, db backend, os independent, self-hosted (with option for cloud) and no requirement for a web interface. Just my .02 cents.
- tconfrey 5y ago
  @cyberge99 check out BrainTool[1]. Its a Chromium extension that allows you to capture bookmarks and notes into a hierarchical topic tree thats stored in an org-mode syntax plain text file editable w emacs or any org editor (incl Orgzly on Android). It's not browser dependent for capture and navigation (not sure how it could be) but otherwise checks your boxes. [1] https://braintool.org/2021/08/25/Managing-your-Browser-with-BrainTool.html https://braintool.org/2021/08/25/Managing-your-Browser-with-...

hk1337 5y ago

Can this import .webloc and .url files? If there's something I want to keep, I will normally just drag the url over to my desktop when then saves it as one of those files. I don't have a toolbar showing in my browser and trying to hunt for the link or button to save it is more work than just dragging the url to the desktop.

betahuhn 5y ago
Not at moment no. You can only add links via the browser extensions and the dashboard. The extension supports an omnibox though so you can just type "wc" in your address bar, press tab and everything after that will be added as a URL to your WebCrate instance.

larrywright 5y ago

Neat product! I wanted to point out a couple of typos on the landing page: “Subscribe directly to another users WebCrate instace“ “Stays running even if the we disappear.” You might want to use a tool like Grammarly to help tighten up the marketing copy (or just pay a copywriter - you can probably even find someone at your university to do it for cheap). Not a criticism, just a suggestion.

betahuhn 5y ago
Whoops! Thanks so much for pointing them out! Thought I fixed all the typos, but some always get through! Grammarly might be a good solution, thanks :D
- riffic 5y ago
  There's also a couple typos here: > Descentralized > Subscribe directly to another users WebCrate instace btw, how have you implemented interoperability?
  - betahuhn 5y ago
    Thanks, fixed! Between WebCrate instances? Thanks to Deta Space each instance has its own domain so it is reachable directly without a gateway or central server. The instance then exposes a public API which another instance and the client can access to get the required data.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I would strongly discourage use of Grammarly: It's essentially a keylogger which uploads everything you type to their cloud service, and there is really no guarantee of privacy or ability to delete that data.
- betahuhn 5y ago
  Good to know, thanks! I'm currently using Microsoft's Editor extension. Do you have any good alternatives?

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

Deta Space appears to be very lacking in the product details department. I see a comment saying you can't self-host it, so it has to be on Deta's cloud, or can you even bring your own cloud provider? Is there any technical/security guarantee's to Deta's privacy claims? For one, a casual reading of their privacy page suggests they integrate a half dozen analytics (aka monitoring) tools including Google Analytics.

riffic 5y ago
from the looks of it, I assume Deta is some sort of PaaS, and aims to be a hybrid between Heroku and Glitch. It's an interesting space to be in, but the product's maturity leaves a lot to be desired. If you have concerns you should probably just be using Heroku or your own homegrown solution in IaaS/Bare Metal.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  Well, the interesting thing is the developer experience seems to be very much like Sandstorm.io: "Publishing on Space allowed me to act like I was building this app for one person; I didn't have to worry about authentication" But it doesn't seem to provide any real description of technical justifications to claim Deta provides "privacy".
  - abdelhai 5y ago
    We give every app instance it's own server (VM) and database. It is completely isolated from all other instances of the same app. The developer has no access to your app instances or their data. Take a look at our sister product for the technical details "Deta Cloud" (deta.sh) We don't have much information on Space as we're still in the alpha stage.
- abdelhai 5y ago
  Deta Space is still in developer alpha. We have a long way to go! Deta Cloud (deta.sh) is a PaaS like Heroku. Deta Space (deta.space) on the other hand is something new we call the "personal cloud". We will announce more soon.

DerekBickerton 5y ago

I use Pinboard for a cloud-based solution to bookmarking, and I export my Pinboard bookmark collection to an on-premises local PC location every 4 months or so, in-case Pinboard's servers are somehow destroyed (which is unlikely, but still possible). All my browser bookmarks accumulate to staggering volumes after each year, and then I simply prune the cruft, or low-quality bookmarks and curate a list of all the best ones, all using Firefox's bookmark library, which is an underestimated tool and enormously useful for organizing bookmarks. I typically use Firefox's bookmarks export feature that generates a HTML file that I can then browse at my leisure at any time and create a sort of 'master list' of bookmarks that I can then backup in Pinboard, or other cloud services to refer back to at any time.

selftemp 5y ago

As someone with over 2000+ bookmarks organized under 30+ folders on Google bookmarks, I've been looking for a self-hosted bookmarking tool with a nice UI that can run on my home server and is easily available across all platforms and devices for a while. This looks like a great start but I wouldn't call it self-hosted though, I'm more than happy to pay a nominal one time fee for a docker deployable image version of this.

betahuhn 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I can now see why not everyone has the same understanding of "self-hosted", which is totally okay! I am not planning on providing a version of WebCrate which can be run on any server any time soon. WebCrate uses services provided by Deta (like Deta Base for the database) internally and thus can't be moved to a docker image without a rewrite of the backend. I hope you understand and may consider giving Deta Space/WebCrate a try in the future!

dang 5y ago

The word 'self-hosted' is like 'open source' in that it leads to tons of distracting objections when people disagree about what it ought to mean. Since that's been happening a lot in this thread, the easiest thing is to take the term out of the title, and thus (hopefully) the issue off the table. Let's stick to discussing the project now!

betahuhn 5y ago
Thanks, didn't expect so much backlash about the term!
- ohyeshedid 5y ago
  That's because self-hosted implies choice of where it's run; you don't offer that.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't start again :)

Saris 5y ago

This looks great, but there's no chance I'm going to use it on this detaspace service, since their website doesn't even explain what it does.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pickledish 5y ago

> Deta Space made it really easy for me as dev to build something like WebCrate quickly and it's also awesome for users. The app keeps running even if I disappear and hosting, auth etc. is all handled for me Ah yeah, love the concept, I had similar goals in mind when making Cardi (although I wasn't aware of many options at the time for putting data in control of the user -- I ended up just having people log in with AWS access keys and it stores data in DynamoDB, which is weird but has actually been working pretty well so far). https://github.com/pickledish/cardi https://github.com/pickledish/cardi Deta seems really interesting, looking forward to seeing where it goes from here! Would love more/better options in this space.

betahuhn 5y ago
Yeah it's an awesome concept! Cardi looks great too! Might be worth to see if you can port it to Space, would make it easier for non-tech people to use it!

hammyhavoc 5y ago

Give me Docker or give me death.

garyfirestorm 5y ago

Can someone recommend a truly self hosted solution? I too use pinboard but I would like to host on my raspi or something

sissbruecker 5y ago
I'm the author of linkding (1), an open-source, self-hosted bookmark manager that is similar to Pinboard, minus the social features. It uses Docker for deployments, SQLite as database and runs on Raspberry Pis. There are many other solutions in the self-hosted space, such as Shiori or LinkAce. 1: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

ibdf 5y ago

This is the second project I see here on Deta Space but I dont exactly follow what Deta Space is... is it a cloud service that hosts the app for you, under your account? I did not sign-up because I didn't see any pricing page. Then there's Deta Cloud, which has pricing, but it's all so unclear as to what I am signing up for.