10 ms·

Pinboard vs. Raindrop

195 points by zem 4y ago

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Raindrop is excellent value for the price, highly recommend. Author makes some good points, but I still argue Raindrop is a superior product depending on your perspective as a bookmark tool user. Pinboard feels dead/abandonware unfortunately. (Paying Raindrop user, no other affiliation)
hs86 4y ago
Is there an alternative that focuses on local storage, which easily syncs between my devices via Dropbox etc.? Zotero comes close, but it has a weird full-text search, and the UI is not as nice as Raindrop's. The other issue is to retroactively get local snapshots of these pages when the bookmark collection already consists of several thousand items.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  ArchiveBox might be a better fit for your use case. Maybe a bit of overkill, but better to have more and not need it versus not having everything you need, right? https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
- altilunium 4y ago
  https://github.com/altilunium/kramb https://github.com/altilunium/kramb Focuses on local storage, easily syncs between devices (via centralized server that i have to pay each month though)... Or, you could just simply self-host the sync server by yourself.
  - canadiantim 4y ago
    By syncing between devices do you mean that the centralized server serves as the single source of truth, which is accessible to all your devices? Or is there storage locally on each of your devices too that is synced with this centralized server as well?
- canadiantim 4y ago
  How would a browser-based bookmark website (that is not self-hosted) even provide the ability to use local storage? SQLite? that somehow is stored locally, even on desktop? Could Litestream or some other new tech like that help here? Or file-based? with some sort of sync-based system? Manual syncing or automatic? Similar to dropbox, I guess I struggle to clearly see how local storage could be achieved technically
  - otsaloma 4y ago
    IndexedDB is probably what's meant, Local Storage (if taken literally) is a simpler and perhaps too limited a solution. There are some options that make IndexedDB easier to use, I've been using PouchDB, which works well. If syncing to Dropbox, you'd then dump the database into a JSON string/file and use the Dropbox SDKs to sync that. If syncing to a database, you can do something more efficient.
- NightlyNorth 4y ago
  Should be doable with nb - https://github.com/xwmx/nb#-bookmarks https://github.com/xwmx/nb#-bookmarks Each bookmark is saved as a markdown file so syncing is straightforward. I mainly use it with the command line interface but you can also use a UI running in the browser.
- otsaloma 4y ago
  Bort does just that, uses browser's IndexedDB and syncs via Dropbox. But note though, that it's not similar to Pinboard etc. in the sense that it's not designed for a huge archive of rarely accessed bookmarks. Works well for something smaller, like what people commonly have as browser bookmarks. https://bort.io/ https://bort.io/ Some comparison on the about page against other services: https://bort.io/about.html https://bort.io/about.html
- leokennis 4y ago
  Can’t you bend DevonThink to your workflow? It’s way too complicated for me with a too steep learning curve, but as I understand it it’s the gold standard of “information management” and its active users adore it.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Yes: the browser extension "MarkDownload" into a blog roll style folder structure in a PKM tool such as Obsidian, with file sync.
bob234 4y ago
l0b0 4y ago
As a power user (21k bookmarks, 16k tags) I'm sorry to see Pinboard dying. I don't want any more features, but the killer feature introduced a few years, ago, archiving, is long dead: > You asked to download your archive on 2022-10-04 17:36:42. > You'll get email once the download link is ready. Yeah, nah. I've requested this many times since it stopped working, and that was probably more than a year ago now. Fortunately XML/HTML/JSON backups still work, so moving to another service should be easy.
- robbintt 4y ago
  (comment was incorrect)
  - thomas536 4y ago
    Did they publish that fact anywhere?
    - robbintt 4y ago
      I apparently misread the tweet last year. They took the year off twitter LOL. https://twitter.com/pinboard/ https://twitter.com/pinboard/
  - austinjp 4y ago
    I've seen people (on here?) suggest that Maciej is on a long period of leave from Pinboard, and will definitely return to breathe fresh life into the product. But I don't think I've seen an official statement from him to that effect, not on the blog anyway https://blog.pinboard.in/ https://blog.pinboard.in/ Do we know if he's okay?
    - nathcd 4y ago
      > Do we know if he's okay? He last commented on HN four days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords
mbesto 4y ago
Weird, I totally had the opposite response on everyone one of these dimensions. Actually what became clear is that the author has a specific use case (sharing with students) that Raindrop doesn't fit well for (individual bookmarking), which is probably not the use case that 90% of the users are looking for.
RistrettoMike 4y ago
Man, I hope Pinboard stays up awhile longer. Genuinely one of my favorite simple, reliable internet tools. I don't need new features, I just need it to continue to exist.
- idlewords 4y ago
  I got you fam
  - gilrain 4y ago
    Do you also got the folks paying you money for broken services, or just the ones who are happy with the parts that still work?
  - RistrettoMike 4y ago
    <3 Cheers!
  - pgayed 4y ago
    Maciej, tech stocks have cratered, Pinboard needs its next acquisition target. I say we go for fb --pinboarding since 2011
    - nickf 4y ago
      Honestly, he may be able to grab Twitter for a few picodollars in a month or so.
  - akerl_ 4y ago
    It feels weird for you to address one positive comment here but not any of the folks saying they’re running into persistent issues with both their accounts and with attempting to get a response from support.
- icc97 4y ago
  Definitely, pinboard still does exactly what it's supposed to - store my bookmarks. I've got 17780 bookmarks[1] at the moment. I didn't try the auto archiving, but I happily switched to the new basic level payment model when he asked. It's been a stable part of my life for more than a decade. [1]: https://pinboard.in/u:ianchanning
bsnnkv 4y ago
Really interesting to see these sorts of comparisons both as someone who was previously a heavy user of Pinboard and really admired what Maciej was able to achieve with solid execution on a simple idea. One thing that I found really lacking in Raindrop and other alternatives was the support for treating online commentary as a first class citizen, which ultimately led me to develop my own little service which has served me very well since 2020.[1] I have made it available to others to use over a 2-year-long free beta test which will end this year, but ultimately I'm starting to think that this kind of service is just so personal (or maybe, that my own needs are so individual?) that it's hard for users to settle on a service in this area that leaves them feeling completely satisfied. [1]: https://notado.app https://notado.app
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Seems like a neat service and spin on bookmarking. Checking it out.
- canadiantim 4y ago
  Looks very nice. May I ask, how do you intend to handle moderation?
  - bsnnkv 4y ago
    I feel you may be a bit more optimistic than I am about how many people will pay to use Notado once the free beta ends. ;) It's not something I've thought extensively about. I imagine the worst case scenario (outside of having to comply with legal orders) would be having to disable public feeds for somebody, but I'm not too comfortable getting into specifics based on hypotheticals at this point. Hopefully I'll never have to cross that bridge, but if I do, I'll cross it when I come to it.
- s3000 4y ago
  >Notado is a content-first approach to online bookmarking, where the paragraphs and sentences that make you want to bookmark something are treated as first-class citizens rather than pieces of additional metadata. With Notado, your bookmarks focus around selections of text, which are fully searchable and can be organised however makes sense to you with a powerful automatic tagging system. With first-class paragraphs, how do you position yourself in relation to Obsidian and Roam? >https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development Looking at that example, is it possible to add comments to the quotes? I am looking for a timeless service where I can share a bookmark with others and have them add their comments, preferably openly with ActivityPub. Your Kulli service seems to be a complement for that: >https://kulli.sh/search?q=https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-users-mastodon-meltdown/ https://kulli.sh/search?q=https://www.wired.com/story/twitte... It would be nice to discover people with the same interests and their links about the same topic. Do you have plans to extend kulli.sh to include Twitter and other social networks? The difficulty of ranking a huge amount of comments seems to be accessible with the history of good comments from notado.app.
snitzr 4y ago
I love Pinboard.
osculum 4y ago
I've been a pinboard user for ~6 years and I won't be renewing my subscription. After a few years of using it I signed up for an archival account (which costs extra $39 per year). My credit card was charged, but I wasn't able to archive any page; the option to do so was never there. I emailed support (I guess it goes directly to Maciej) and NEVER got an answer, despite being a paid customer and following up several times. I ended up having to do a charge-back on my credit card. Very unprofessional. On the flip side, that made me look into self hosting and now I happily run a linkding [1] instance on my NAS. I never really cared about the social aspect of it. [1] https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
- l0b0 4y ago
  The archiving happens automatically; you shouldn't need to do anything except request an archive backup[1]. Unfortunately those requests are not honoured, and haven't been for a long time (my last successful backup was in July 2020). [1] https://pinboard.in/settings/backup https://pinboard.in/settings/backup
  - osculum 4y ago
    Ah my memory is blurry in the specifics. I think the issue was then that the archived link never showed up. Definitely it didn't work. I checked an rechecked the FAQ to make sure that in fact it wasn't working for me, and it wasn't that I didn't know how to use it. -- Actually... I just checked my emails. My account never upgraded after payment (it was still standard) and the check-mark didn't appear next to my links. And of course there was no way for me to see the archived page or request an archive backup.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    Yup. I have an archival account and none of my archived articles work. Some of them show an error, I hit the button to recrawl, but that just results in the error reappearing after a while. Others don’t show an error, but when I want to view the archived version, it says it didn’t find it. So I have a bunch of links in there, which already link-rotted, and weren’t successfully archived by Pinboard. I’m considering moving to just using the SavePage (or whatever it was called) browser extension with a text file for the metadata (url, tags, titles, notes) on a NAS.
exodust 4y ago
When Pinboard's price suddenly doubled I suddenly stopped paying. Wasn't a heavy user so the price hike wasn't relevant to me. I wish consumption-based pricing was more of a thing.
akshaykumar90 4y ago
Great comparison. I am working on Savory which tries to keep it very simple and might be interesting to folks looking to jump off Pinboard: https://getsavory.co/ https://getsavory.co/. There is a chrome extension to save links and tags are a first-class citizen. There is no support for archiving or sharing yet, but it is something I want to add soon.
jacquesc 4y ago
I paid for Raindrop for years, really loved it. But it got extremely buggy (forced me to relogin constantly). I'd open Raindrop, it would completely reset my auth info, and then close it because it's not worth the hassle of logging in yet again just to save a bookmark. And when they clear out login, they clear out everything (including the email). Their iOS share panel was an absolute disaster. Their UX was great, but it's a nice case study that if you don't focus on the seemingly little but important things (like making Auth seamless and bulletproof), everything else is meaningless. Dropbox is the same way. Opening a document never chooses the right account (corp vs personal), constantly clears SSO session, and I usually give up 95% of the time instead of using the app.
- HomeDeLaPot 4y ago
  Hmm. I'm currently using Raindrop and haven't ever been logged out. It's been pretty solid for the past year or so I've used it on (Android app and Firefox extension on MacOS).
  - jacquesc 4y ago
    Cool, it's been a while so maybe I'll give it another try
maliker 4y ago
I used hypothes.is for highlighting, but now that tons of sites (like this one) block external javascript I needed something with a good safari plugin to get around that without too many hacks. Raindrop fit the bill. I’m a very happy customer, would happily pay more.
joshmarinacci 4y ago
I’ve been messing around with a little cloud service to do something like pinboard for personal use. I never thought about turning it into a commercial service because I figured there were already lots of great solutions out there. No I might reconsider it if there’s interest. Message me if you’d like to talk.
jweatherby 4y ago
I built a little hybrid bookmarking/notetaking app - https://www.showboard.ca/ https://www.showboard.ca/ It's not built for bulk usage like you're describing, but makes it easy enough to scrape, modify, share and search. Let me know if this is of interest (it has a python backend ;)
- s3000 4y ago
  Do you have an ActivityPub interface to follow shared posts?
  - jweatherby 4y ago
    No, the sharing aspect is internal to the app, so each "board" can have as many users as you like. Neat idea though, I'll have to look into that.
francisfeng 4y ago
If anyone is looking for a native solution on macOS, check out my app Anybox: https://anybox.app https://anybox.app
- nklmilojevic 4y ago
  This one is amazing, never heard of it and thanks for sharing! Appreciate that you added lifetime subscription as well, but for now subscribed monthly :)
kashunstva 4y ago
An alternative, one that I began using a year ago after losing confidence in Pinboard is the self-hosted Espial - https://github.com/jonschoning/espial https://github.com/jonschoning/espial. The visual presentation is a near complete clone of Pinboard. It also provides a route for Pinboard import.
- infp_arborist 4y ago
  I use Shaarli on Yunohost, but there are many more options: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#bookmarks-and-link-sharing https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#boo...
landhar 4y ago
I’m working on an open-source social bookmarking site in Elixir that is API compatible with delicious/pinboard. Its named linkhut and it’s currently able to import your bookmarks from pinboard and browser exports. The flagship instance is: https://ln.ht https://ln.ht The source code is hosted here: https://sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut/ https://sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut/ The documentation: https://docs.linkhut.org/introduction.html https://docs.linkhut.org/introduction.html Two things that I think are very important in a bookmarking app (and why I‘ve been working on making one of my own on and off for a while): open source and offering an API for other tools to build upon. The current API on linkhut aims to be bug for bug compatible with pinboard while being more OAuth-y. I’m still working on a snapshotting feature similar to pinboard’s, once that’s ready I think I’ll call 1.0 complete. Perhaps I’ll do a Show HN then.
- test1235 4y ago
  I just created a new account and migrated my bookmarks from pinboard - worked great!
  - landhar 4y ago
    Glad to hear! Let me know if you run into any issues either here or directly by cutting a ticket: https://todo.sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut https://todo.sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut
  - wyclif 4y ago
    So how do you export your bookmarks from pinboard?
    - test1235 4y ago
      settings -> backup you want to export as html, in netscape format
      - wyclif 4y ago
        Settings -> Import. Tried it as an experiment (I'm planning on staying with Pinboard, at least as long as it keeps working), but it keeps failing, at least when trying to import as HTML.
kilian 4y ago
I realise this is a comparison article with a funny intro but I honestly don't understand that when you have a _list of links_ that you need to share with students you chose a third party website and then act shocked pikachu when that third party website has a hick-up. There are hundreds of fool-save options that make it so you don't have to depend on a third party, here are some: You could email the links to students. List them on the personal website that this is written on. Have a reader that lists them. Co-host them with the rest of the assignment.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  We all have different needs and levels of technical proficiency. My first thought was also “file -> save as” and share the html. But does he necessarily know how to host an html page? Maybe he needs the tags page to be updated throughout the semester? Regardless, he is right to feel that pinboard owed it to him to give him a heads-ups on depreciation of a feature.
beaker52 4y ago
I’m really surprised the author hates on Raindrop so much because my experience has been nothing but good. If anyone is building one of these bookmark apps, one of the killer features for me is the ability to highlight and annotate a copy (in case it disappears) of the page, so I know why I even cared about it in the first place.
- deelly 4y ago
  There some strange claims regarding Raindrop. > Raindrop displays by very-poorly-implemented “relevance” by default at all times (that is, not just in response to a search, where this might make sense if the implementation weren’t so awful), and this default cannot be changed, so I have to click twice every time I load a Raindrop page to switch to reverse-chronological. When I open Raindrop it always remembers last sort (chronological), so I never have to click sorting button ever again.
  - leokennis 4y ago
    Was surprised here too. You can display bookmarks in 4 ways (list, cards, moodboard, headlines) and choose up to 6 data fields per bookmark (cover photo, title, description, highlights, tags, info) and sort in 7 ways (date asc desc, name asc desc, url asc desc and manual). That’s 168 ways to display bookmarks, and every collection can have a different sort. The site and apps sync and remember these display options flawlessly.
omnimus 4y ago
Another good alternative is https://www.are.na/ https://www.are.na/ it is also tiny team but they have been around for a while and they pretty openly communicate their state/financials.
nlnn 4y ago
I paid for Pinboard for life very early on, and remember getting an email a while back encouraging everyone to pay for a subcription instead so that development could continue. I wonder if that didn't work out somehow, and revenue wasn't enough to encourage development/maintenance of the service. I've not logged in for years though, so the site's not been on my radar until today.
pjbster 4y ago
Pinboard's performance was ultimately what led me to abandon it in the end. I really like Firefox's built-in bookmark manager. It supports both hierarchy and tags and, if you export your Pinboard bookmarks to html, the file will include the tags which Firefox will preserve just fine when it imports everything. I don't use Firefox as my day to day browser but all of my bookmarks live in there and I can search them from there much faster than any website. Those bookmarks live in a sqlite file which is easy to browse (good luck reverse engineering its schema though) so if anyone fancied knocking up a command line tool to search it I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult.
squallstar 4y ago
I always found bookmark apps to be missing the features I needed to I ended building my own open-source bookmarking tool back in 2015 and I still use it to this day. I'll share it here in case it's helpful to any of you. Here's where it's being hosted as a service: https://fragments.me https://fragments.me Here's the open-source code: https://github.com/squallstar/fragments https://github.com/squallstar/fragments
- tomcam 4y ago
  Pretty neat! How do you run it for free?
  - squallstar 4y ago
    Fragments.me doesn't run it for free, I pay for hosting and devops (which I do on my own). Running it on your own should take minutes as it's just a Meteor app, so anything like a cheap ubuntu box with node.js and meteor would do.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      What a generous thing to do! Very kind.
segphault 4y ago
Raindrop released a major update with highlighting features two months after this blog post was written, so the author's concern about the lack of recent updates is likely due to that major feature being under development at the time. I'm a heavy Raindrop user and have been extremely happy with the service. I don't really use the social features, though.
bambax 4y ago
I'm a Pinboard user and am happy with the bookmarklet which in my experience works flawlessly. But... I (almost) never lookup any of my bookmarks. Googling is faster -- and safer, since it's possible I'm wrong and didn't actually bookmark what I'm looking for. Bookmarking satisfies the mind; it's a bit like hoarding. Maybe the best bookmarking service would be a mock interface that doesn't actually do anything.
- alfonsodev 4y ago
  that's hilarious and maybe true!
- morisy 4y ago
  This, but for the read later service.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Ever since I found the 'highlight or hide search engine results' extension I have pretty much never browsed raindrop directly for technical stuff. I do still keep it around for the webpage highlights and tagging my twitter likes, though.
- iKlsR 4y ago
  I agree as I've been in the same position but if you don't tag these properly then they are almost useless. Heavy bookmarker nowadays, 10s of thousands and I search it before I google because HIGH chances are it's something I've encountered before, even just a small tag like {math} helps greatly, even better, {math}, {vectors}, {gamedev}. I even dump research sessions there, eg. if I spend time on a gnarly bug or im grokking a new topic like ml and at the end I have 30 tabs open I save these as a group and label it as such "android opengl mapbox rendering issue", "math for ml" etc. One of the most annoying things is finding the perfect link and you know you did but can't find it again when you need to. Also god forbid you end up on a stackexchange site or forum and find yourself as the one answering (has caught me many times) [1]. [1] - Slightly related, https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
  - 4y ago
hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
The author used a SASS bookmarking service when any number of general purpose options would have sufficed. Google doc, HTML file on a web-server, text file on a share somewhere... The only time I bookmark something is when I find something interesting that I wasn't looking for OR some obscure page that's hard to get to in a SASS product. It's too much work curating bookmarks, and for me the utility marginal at best. Often times when I go to look up a saved bookmark, the page has moved so I have to find it again anyway.
justusthane 4y ago
I'm a paying Pinboard customer (switched from a grandfathered-in one-time payment to an annual archival subscription). I've loved Pinboard for a long time, and really want to continue to love it. It's felt to me for a long time that Maciej is burnt out and Pinboard is on a slow death spiral. It's one thing to leave good-enough alone and not develop new features, but it's another to not fix the things that are broken and let the product continue to gather rust - especially when you've moved your customers from one-time payments to subscriptions. It's really too bad - it seemed like there could have been an enormous amount of inertia after the rather poetic del.icio.us acquisition, and the release of the archival feature was promising. I'm still hopeful though, and that's why so far I continue to pay my $40/year.
tptacek 4y ago
Pinboard has been rock solid for me? This is one of those HN topics like the phone numbers in Signal or the error handling in Go (two other perennially doomed projects) that just won't ever die. It's too bad that the whole thread here is a referendum on the health of Pinboard's development practices, rather than a discussion of the article, which is pretty solid and interesting.
- gilrain 4y ago
  > Pinboard has been rock solid for me? Do you pay for archiving? Have you tested that it’s working?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I do. Seems to be?
    - couchand 4y ago
      Could you kindly help out the other users here who all have described the archiving being broken for years?
      - tptacek 4y ago
        DM for my rate sheet.
        couchand 4y ago
        Why even bother commenting, Thomas?
        tptacek 4y ago
        I was asked a question. I answered it. I don't know what you think is going on here, but I think it's probably simpler than you think it is. This is my thing about Pinboard drama (and Go drama, and Signal drama) on HN. It's made to seem like a gripping psychodrama. But there's less going on than you think. I'm telling you: I use Pinboard every day, it's been rock solid for me, I don't use archiving all that often, but I clicked around and all my archivey things seem to be working. That's all I've got for you.
alxjsn 4y ago
Even though the main site isn’t really actively being developed anymore, the Pins for Pinboard iOS is a third-party app that is continuously getting updates and is very polished. If it weren’t for this very functional and pretty app I probably would be more annoyed.
SergeAx 4y ago
Can anyone tell me the purpose of bookmarks in 2022? I have only one hypothesis that it is for users who hate keyboard. Any frequently visited site pops up after Alt-D and first 2-3 letters of it's title or URL. Any infrequently visited site is easier to find with search engine after your bookmarks number is above 100.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  A problem with amateur user generated content (which is what I mainly like) is that the uploaders are really shit at describing their post. Sure, describing a picture of a shady copse of trees as 'my favorite place to relax' will look good in an algo feed, but how am I supposed to find that later? Okay I will 'save' the post on reddit but it is saved exactly as it is to a chronological list. Same goes with your twitter likes or whatever. Bookmarking services let you write your own title/blurb/tag so now it is /actually/ findable.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    Ah, I see. This particular case I am handling by filing a geoposition in one of my Google Maps lists with a comment or maybe a link to the source. This way I also have a chance to visit it while nearby. This adds a small dependency on Google, but so does any bookmarking service, unless it is self-hosted. I will give this another think though, thank you!
tsp 4y ago
I switched from Pinboard to Raindrop to AnyBox. Pinboard hasn’t received much love for years and when I received an answer to my support request a year after sending the email, it was clear that I have to look somewhere else. Raindrop felt like an okay replacement, but never felt solid to me and introduced a bunch of “undefined” categories. Very inconvenient to deal with. I am now using AnyBox [1], a macOS and iOS app that syncs using iCloud. The developer is super responsive and I could not be happier! [1] https://anybox.app/ https://anybox.app/

195 points by zem 4y ago

Raindrop is excellent value for the price, highly recommend. Author makes some good points, but I still argue Raindrop is a superior product depending on your perspective as a bookmark tool user. Pinboard feels dead/abandonware unfortunately. (Paying Raindrop user, no other affiliation)

hs86 4y ago

Is there an alternative that focuses on local storage, which easily syncs between my devices via Dropbox etc.? Zotero comes close, but it has a weird full-text search, and the UI is not as nice as Raindrop's. The other issue is to retroactively get local snapshots of these pages when the bookmark collection already consists of several thousand items.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
ArchiveBox might be a better fit for your use case. Maybe a bit of overkill, but better to have more and not need it versus not having everything you need, right? https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/
altilunium 4y ago
https://github.com/altilunium/kramb https://github.com/altilunium/kramb Focuses on local storage, easily syncs between devices (via centralized server that i have to pay each month though)... Or, you could just simply self-host the sync server by yourself.
- canadiantim 4y ago
  By syncing between devices do you mean that the centralized server serves as the single source of truth, which is accessible to all your devices? Or is there storage locally on each of your devices too that is synced with this centralized server as well?
canadiantim 4y ago
How would a browser-based bookmark website (that is not self-hosted) even provide the ability to use local storage? SQLite? that somehow is stored locally, even on desktop? Could Litestream or some other new tech like that help here? Or file-based? with some sort of sync-based system? Manual syncing or automatic? Similar to dropbox, I guess I struggle to clearly see how local storage could be achieved technically
- otsaloma 4y ago
  IndexedDB is probably what's meant, Local Storage (if taken literally) is a simpler and perhaps too limited a solution. There are some options that make IndexedDB easier to use, I've been using PouchDB, which works well. If syncing to Dropbox, you'd then dump the database into a JSON string/file and use the Dropbox SDKs to sync that. If syncing to a database, you can do something more efficient.
NightlyNorth 4y ago
Should be doable with nb - https://github.com/xwmx/nb#-bookmarks https://github.com/xwmx/nb#-bookmarks Each bookmark is saved as a markdown file so syncing is straightforward. I mainly use it with the command line interface but you can also use a UI running in the browser.
otsaloma 4y ago
Bort does just that, uses browser's IndexedDB and syncs via Dropbox. But note though, that it's not similar to Pinboard etc. in the sense that it's not designed for a huge archive of rarely accessed bookmarks. Works well for something smaller, like what people commonly have as browser bookmarks. https://bort.io/ https://bort.io/ Some comparison on the about page against other services: https://bort.io/about.html https://bort.io/about.html
leokennis 4y ago
Can’t you bend DevonThink to your workflow? It’s way too complicated for me with a too steep learning curve, but as I understand it it’s the gold standard of “information management” and its active users adore it.
Terretta 4y ago
Yes: the browser extension "MarkDownload" into a blog roll style folder structure in a PKM tool such as Obsidian, with file sync.

bob234 4y ago

l0b0 4y ago

As a power user (21k bookmarks, 16k tags) I'm sorry to see Pinboard dying. I don't want any more features, but the killer feature introduced a few years, ago, archiving, is long dead: > You asked to download your archive on 2022-10-04 17:36:42. > You'll get email once the download link is ready. Yeah, nah. I've requested this many times since it stopped working, and that was probably more than a year ago now. Fortunately XML/HTML/JSON backups still work, so moving to another service should be easy.

robbintt 4y ago
(comment was incorrect)
- thomas536 4y ago
  Did they publish that fact anywhere?
  - robbintt 4y ago
    I apparently misread the tweet last year. They took the year off twitter LOL. https://twitter.com/pinboard/ https://twitter.com/pinboard/
- austinjp 4y ago
  I've seen people (on here?) suggest that Maciej is on a long period of leave from Pinboard, and will definitely return to breathe fresh life into the product. But I don't think I've seen an official statement from him to that effect, not on the blog anyway https://blog.pinboard.in/ https://blog.pinboard.in/ Do we know if he's okay?
  - nathcd 4y ago
    > Do we know if he's okay? He last commented on HN four days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords

mbesto 4y ago

Weird, I totally had the opposite response on everyone one of these dimensions. Actually what became clear is that the author has a specific use case (sharing with students) that Raindrop doesn't fit well for (individual bookmarking), which is probably not the use case that 90% of the users are looking for.

RistrettoMike 4y ago

Man, I hope Pinboard stays up awhile longer. Genuinely one of my favorite simple, reliable internet tools. I don't need new features, I just need it to continue to exist.

idlewords 4y ago
I got you fam
- gilrain 4y ago
  Do you also got the folks paying you money for broken services, or just the ones who are happy with the parts that still work?
- RistrettoMike 4y ago
  <3 Cheers!
- pgayed 4y ago
  Maciej, tech stocks have cratered, Pinboard needs its next acquisition target. I say we go for fb --pinboarding since 2011
  - nickf 4y ago
    Honestly, he may be able to grab Twitter for a few picodollars in a month or so.
- akerl_ 4y ago
  It feels weird for you to address one positive comment here but not any of the folks saying they’re running into persistent issues with both their accounts and with attempting to get a response from support.
icc97 4y ago
Definitely, pinboard still does exactly what it's supposed to - store my bookmarks. I've got 17780 bookmarks[1] at the moment. I didn't try the auto archiving, but I happily switched to the new basic level payment model when he asked. It's been a stable part of my life for more than a decade. [1]: https://pinboard.in/u:ianchanning

bsnnkv 4y ago

Really interesting to see these sorts of comparisons both as someone who was previously a heavy user of Pinboard and really admired what Maciej was able to achieve with solid execution on a simple idea. One thing that I found really lacking in Raindrop and other alternatives was the support for treating online commentary as a first class citizen, which ultimately led me to develop my own little service which has served me very well since 2020.[1] I have made it available to others to use over a 2-year-long free beta test which will end this year, but ultimately I'm starting to think that this kind of service is just so personal (or maybe, that my own needs are so individual?) that it's hard for users to settle on a service in this area that leaves them feeling completely satisfied. [1]: https://notado.app https://notado.app

skinnymuch 4y ago
Seems like a neat service and spin on bookmarking. Checking it out.
canadiantim 4y ago
Looks very nice. May I ask, how do you intend to handle moderation?
- bsnnkv 4y ago
  I feel you may be a bit more optimistic than I am about how many people will pay to use Notado once the free beta ends. ;) It's not something I've thought extensively about. I imagine the worst case scenario (outside of having to comply with legal orders) would be having to disable public feeds for somebody, but I'm not too comfortable getting into specifics based on hypotheticals at this point. Hopefully I'll never have to cross that bridge, but if I do, I'll cross it when I come to it.
s3000 4y ago
>Notado is a content-first approach to online bookmarking, where the paragraphs and sentences that make you want to bookmark something are treated as first-class citizens rather than pieces of additional metadata. With Notado, your bookmarks focus around selections of text, which are fully searchable and can be organised however makes sense to you with a powerful automatic tagging system. With first-class paragraphs, how do you position yourself in relation to Obsidian and Roam? >https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development Looking at that example, is it possible to add comments to the quotes? I am looking for a timeless service where I can share a bookmark with others and have them add their comments, preferably openly with ActivityPub. Your Kulli service seems to be a complement for that: >https://kulli.sh/search?q=https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-users-mastodon-meltdown/ https://kulli.sh/search?q=https://www.wired.com/story/twitte... It would be nice to discover people with the same interests and their links about the same topic. Do you have plans to extend kulli.sh to include Twitter and other social networks? The difficulty of ranking a huge amount of comments seems to be accessible with the history of good comments from notado.app.

snitzr 4y ago

I love Pinboard.

osculum 4y ago

I've been a pinboard user for ~6 years and I won't be renewing my subscription. After a few years of using it I signed up for an archival account (which costs extra $39 per year). My credit card was charged, but I wasn't able to archive any page; the option to do so was never there. I emailed support (I guess it goes directly to Maciej) and NEVER got an answer, despite being a paid customer and following up several times. I ended up having to do a charge-back on my credit card. Very unprofessional. On the flip side, that made me look into self hosting and now I happily run a linkding [1] instance on my NAS. I never really cared about the social aspect of it. [1] https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

l0b0 4y ago
The archiving happens automatically; you shouldn't need to do anything except request an archive backup[1]. Unfortunately those requests are not honoured, and haven't been for a long time (my last successful backup was in July 2020). [1] https://pinboard.in/settings/backup https://pinboard.in/settings/backup
- osculum 4y ago
  Ah my memory is blurry in the specifics. I think the issue was then that the archived link never showed up. Definitely it didn't work. I checked an rechecked the FAQ to make sure that in fact it wasn't working for me, and it wasn't that I didn't know how to use it. -- Actually... I just checked my emails. My account never upgraded after payment (it was still standard) and the check-mark didn't appear next to my links. And of course there was no way for me to see the archived page or request an archive backup.
- yakubin 4y ago
  Yup. I have an archival account and none of my archived articles work. Some of them show an error, I hit the button to recrawl, but that just results in the error reappearing after a while. Others don’t show an error, but when I want to view the archived version, it says it didn’t find it. So I have a bunch of links in there, which already link-rotted, and weren’t successfully archived by Pinboard. I’m considering moving to just using the SavePage (or whatever it was called) browser extension with a text file for the metadata (url, tags, titles, notes) on a NAS.

exodust 4y ago

When Pinboard's price suddenly doubled I suddenly stopped paying. Wasn't a heavy user so the price hike wasn't relevant to me. I wish consumption-based pricing was more of a thing.

akshaykumar90 4y ago

Great comparison. I am working on Savory which tries to keep it very simple and might be interesting to folks looking to jump off Pinboard: https://getsavory.co/ https://getsavory.co/. There is a chrome extension to save links and tags are a first-class citizen. There is no support for archiving or sharing yet, but it is something I want to add soon.

jacquesc 4y ago

I paid for Raindrop for years, really loved it. But it got extremely buggy (forced me to relogin constantly). I'd open Raindrop, it would completely reset my auth info, and then close it because it's not worth the hassle of logging in yet again just to save a bookmark. And when they clear out login, they clear out everything (including the email). Their iOS share panel was an absolute disaster. Their UX was great, but it's a nice case study that if you don't focus on the seemingly little but important things (like making Auth seamless and bulletproof), everything else is meaningless. Dropbox is the same way. Opening a document never chooses the right account (corp vs personal), constantly clears SSO session, and I usually give up 95% of the time instead of using the app.

HomeDeLaPot 4y ago
Hmm. I'm currently using Raindrop and haven't ever been logged out. It's been pretty solid for the past year or so I've used it on (Android app and Firefox extension on MacOS).
- jacquesc 4y ago
  Cool, it's been a while so maybe I'll give it another try

maliker 4y ago

I used hypothes.is for highlighting, but now that tons of sites (like this one) block external javascript I needed something with a good safari plugin to get around that without too many hacks. Raindrop fit the bill. I’m a very happy customer, would happily pay more.

joshmarinacci 4y ago

I’ve been messing around with a little cloud service to do something like pinboard for personal use. I never thought about turning it into a commercial service because I figured there were already lots of great solutions out there. No I might reconsider it if there’s interest. Message me if you’d like to talk.

jweatherby 4y ago

I built a little hybrid bookmarking/notetaking app - https://www.showboard.ca/ https://www.showboard.ca/ It's not built for bulk usage like you're describing, but makes it easy enough to scrape, modify, share and search. Let me know if this is of interest (it has a python backend ;)

s3000 4y ago
Do you have an ActivityPub interface to follow shared posts?
- jweatherby 4y ago
  No, the sharing aspect is internal to the app, so each "board" can have as many users as you like. Neat idea though, I'll have to look into that.

francisfeng 4y ago

If anyone is looking for a native solution on macOS, check out my app Anybox: https://anybox.app https://anybox.app

nklmilojevic 4y ago
This one is amazing, never heard of it and thanks for sharing! Appreciate that you added lifetime subscription as well, but for now subscribed monthly :)

kashunstva 4y ago

An alternative, one that I began using a year ago after losing confidence in Pinboard is the self-hosted Espial - https://github.com/jonschoning/espial https://github.com/jonschoning/espial. The visual presentation is a near complete clone of Pinboard. It also provides a route for Pinboard import.

infp_arborist 4y ago
I use Shaarli on Yunohost, but there are many more options: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#bookmarks-and-link-sharing https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#boo...

landhar 4y ago

I’m working on an open-source social bookmarking site in Elixir that is API compatible with delicious/pinboard. Its named linkhut and it’s currently able to import your bookmarks from pinboard and browser exports. The flagship instance is: https://ln.ht https://ln.ht The source code is hosted here: https://sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut/ https://sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut/ The documentation: https://docs.linkhut.org/introduction.html https://docs.linkhut.org/introduction.html Two things that I think are very important in a bookmarking app (and why I‘ve been working on making one of my own on and off for a while): open source and offering an API for other tools to build upon. The current API on linkhut aims to be bug for bug compatible with pinboard while being more OAuth-y. I’m still working on a snapshotting feature similar to pinboard’s, once that’s ready I think I’ll call 1.0 complete. Perhaps I’ll do a Show HN then.

test1235 4y ago
I just created a new account and migrated my bookmarks from pinboard - worked great!
- landhar 4y ago
  Glad to hear! Let me know if you run into any issues either here or directly by cutting a ticket: https://todo.sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut https://todo.sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut
- wyclif 4y ago
  So how do you export your bookmarks from pinboard?
  - test1235 4y ago
    settings -> backup you want to export as html, in netscape format
    - wyclif 4y ago
      Settings -> Import. Tried it as an experiment (I'm planning on staying with Pinboard, at least as long as it keeps working), but it keeps failing, at least when trying to import as HTML.

kilian 4y ago

I realise this is a comparison article with a funny intro but I honestly don't understand that when you have a _list of links_ that you need to share with students you chose a third party website and then act shocked pikachu when that third party website has a hick-up. There are hundreds of fool-save options that make it so you don't have to depend on a third party, here are some: You could email the links to students. List them on the personal website that this is written on. Have a reader that lists them. Co-host them with the rest of the assignment.

wodenokoto 4y ago
We all have different needs and levels of technical proficiency. My first thought was also “file -> save as” and share the html. But does he necessarily know how to host an html page? Maybe he needs the tags page to be updated throughout the semester? Regardless, he is right to feel that pinboard owed it to him to give him a heads-ups on depreciation of a feature.

beaker52 4y ago

I’m really surprised the author hates on Raindrop so much because my experience has been nothing but good. If anyone is building one of these bookmark apps, one of the killer features for me is the ability to highlight and annotate a copy (in case it disappears) of the page, so I know why I even cared about it in the first place.

deelly 4y ago
There some strange claims regarding Raindrop. > Raindrop displays by very-poorly-implemented “relevance” by default at all times (that is, not just in response to a search, where this might make sense if the implementation weren’t so awful), and this default cannot be changed, so I have to click twice every time I load a Raindrop page to switch to reverse-chronological. When I open Raindrop it always remembers last sort (chronological), so I never have to click sorting button ever again.
- leokennis 4y ago
  Was surprised here too. You can display bookmarks in 4 ways (list, cards, moodboard, headlines) and choose up to 6 data fields per bookmark (cover photo, title, description, highlights, tags, info) and sort in 7 ways (date asc desc, name asc desc, url asc desc and manual). That’s 168 ways to display bookmarks, and every collection can have a different sort. The site and apps sync and remember these display options flawlessly.

omnimus 4y ago

Another good alternative is https://www.are.na/ https://www.are.na/ it is also tiny team but they have been around for a while and they pretty openly communicate their state/financials.

nlnn 4y ago

I paid for Pinboard for life very early on, and remember getting an email a while back encouraging everyone to pay for a subcription instead so that development could continue. I wonder if that didn't work out somehow, and revenue wasn't enough to encourage development/maintenance of the service. I've not logged in for years though, so the site's not been on my radar until today.

pjbster 4y ago

Pinboard's performance was ultimately what led me to abandon it in the end. I really like Firefox's built-in bookmark manager. It supports both hierarchy and tags and, if you export your Pinboard bookmarks to html, the file will include the tags which Firefox will preserve just fine when it imports everything. I don't use Firefox as my day to day browser but all of my bookmarks live in there and I can search them from there much faster than any website. Those bookmarks live in a sqlite file which is easy to browse (good luck reverse engineering its schema though) so if anyone fancied knocking up a command line tool to search it I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult.

squallstar 4y ago

I always found bookmark apps to be missing the features I needed to I ended building my own open-source bookmarking tool back in 2015 and I still use it to this day. I'll share it here in case it's helpful to any of you. Here's where it's being hosted as a service: https://fragments.me https://fragments.me Here's the open-source code: https://github.com/squallstar/fragments https://github.com/squallstar/fragments

tomcam 4y ago
Pretty neat! How do you run it for free?
- squallstar 4y ago
  Fragments.me doesn't run it for free, I pay for hosting and devops (which I do on my own). Running it on your own should take minutes as it's just a Meteor app, so anything like a cheap ubuntu box with node.js and meteor would do.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    What a generous thing to do! Very kind.

segphault 4y ago

Raindrop released a major update with highlighting features two months after this blog post was written, so the author's concern about the lack of recent updates is likely due to that major feature being under development at the time. I'm a heavy Raindrop user and have been extremely happy with the service. I don't really use the social features, though.

bambax 4y ago

I'm a Pinboard user and am happy with the bookmarklet which in my experience works flawlessly. But... I (almost) never lookup any of my bookmarks. Googling is faster -- and safer, since it's possible I'm wrong and didn't actually bookmark what I'm looking for. Bookmarking satisfies the mind; it's a bit like hoarding. Maybe the best bookmarking service would be a mock interface that doesn't actually do anything.

alfonsodev 4y ago
that's hilarious and maybe true!
morisy 4y ago
This, but for the read later service.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
Ever since I found the 'highlight or hide search engine results' extension I have pretty much never browsed raindrop directly for technical stuff. I do still keep it around for the webpage highlights and tagging my twitter likes, though.
iKlsR 4y ago
I agree as I've been in the same position but if you don't tag these properly then they are almost useless. Heavy bookmarker nowadays, 10s of thousands and I search it before I google because HIGH chances are it's something I've encountered before, even just a small tag like {math} helps greatly, even better, {math}, {vectors}, {gamedev}. I even dump research sessions there, eg. if I spend time on a gnarly bug or im grokking a new topic like ml and at the end I have 30 tabs open I save these as a group and label it as such "android opengl mapbox rendering issue", "math for ml" etc. One of the most annoying things is finding the perfect link and you know you did but can't find it again when you need to. Also god forbid you end up on a stackexchange site or forum and find yourself as the one answering (has caught me many times) [1]. [1] - Slightly related, https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
- 4y ago

hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago

The author used a SASS bookmarking service when any number of general purpose options would have sufficed. Google doc, HTML file on a web-server, text file on a share somewhere... The only time I bookmark something is when I find something interesting that I wasn't looking for OR some obscure page that's hard to get to in a SASS product. It's too much work curating bookmarks, and for me the utility marginal at best. Often times when I go to look up a saved bookmark, the page has moved so I have to find it again anyway.

justusthane 4y ago

I'm a paying Pinboard customer (switched from a grandfathered-in one-time payment to an annual archival subscription). I've loved Pinboard for a long time, and really want to continue to love it. It's felt to me for a long time that Maciej is burnt out and Pinboard is on a slow death spiral. It's one thing to leave good-enough alone and not develop new features, but it's another to not fix the things that are broken and let the product continue to gather rust - especially when you've moved your customers from one-time payments to subscriptions. It's really too bad - it seemed like there could have been an enormous amount of inertia after the rather poetic del.icio.us acquisition, and the release of the archival feature was promising. I'm still hopeful though, and that's why so far I continue to pay my $40/year.

tptacek 4y ago

Pinboard has been rock solid for me? This is one of those HN topics like the phone numbers in Signal or the error handling in Go (two other perennially doomed projects) that just won't ever die. It's too bad that the whole thread here is a referendum on the health of Pinboard's development practices, rather than a discussion of the article, which is pretty solid and interesting.

gilrain 4y ago
> Pinboard has been rock solid for me? Do you pay for archiving? Have you tested that it’s working?
- tptacek 4y ago
  I do. Seems to be?
  - couchand 4y ago
    Could you kindly help out the other users here who all have described the archiving being broken for years?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      DM for my rate sheet.
      - couchand 4y ago
        Why even bother commenting, Thomas?
        tptacek 4y ago
        I was asked a question. I answered it. I don't know what you think is going on here, but I think it's probably simpler than you think it is. This is my thing about Pinboard drama (and Go drama, and Signal drama) on HN. It's made to seem like a gripping psychodrama. But there's less going on than you think. I'm telling you: I use Pinboard every day, it's been rock solid for me, I don't use archiving all that often, but I clicked around and all my archivey things seem to be working. That's all I've got for you.

alxjsn 4y ago

Even though the main site isn’t really actively being developed anymore, the Pins for Pinboard iOS is a third-party app that is continuously getting updates and is very polished. If it weren’t for this very functional and pretty app I probably would be more annoyed.

SergeAx 4y ago

Can anyone tell me the purpose of bookmarks in 2022? I have only one hypothesis that it is for users who hate keyboard. Any frequently visited site pops up after Alt-D and first 2-3 letters of it's title or URL. Any infrequently visited site is easier to find with search engine after your bookmarks number is above 100.

jabroni_salad 4y ago
A problem with amateur user generated content (which is what I mainly like) is that the uploaders are really shit at describing their post. Sure, describing a picture of a shady copse of trees as 'my favorite place to relax' will look good in an algo feed, but how am I supposed to find that later? Okay I will 'save' the post on reddit but it is saved exactly as it is to a chronological list. Same goes with your twitter likes or whatever. Bookmarking services let you write your own title/blurb/tag so now it is /actually/ findable.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Ah, I see. This particular case I am handling by filing a geoposition in one of my Google Maps lists with a comment or maybe a link to the source. This way I also have a chance to visit it while nearby. This adds a small dependency on Google, but so does any bookmarking service, unless it is self-hosted. I will give this another think though, thank you!

tsp 4y ago

I switched from Pinboard to Raindrop to AnyBox. Pinboard hasn’t received much love for years and when I received an answer to my support request a year after sending the email, it was clear that I have to look somewhere else. Raindrop felt like an okay replacement, but never felt solid to me and introduced a bunch of “undefined” categories. Very inconvenient to deal with. I am now using AnyBox [1], a macOS and iOS app that syncs using iCloud. The developer is super responsive and I could not be happier! [1] https://anybox.app/ https://anybox.app/