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Betula – federated bookmarking software for the independent web
- hammyhavoc 2y agoI like it, but not sure what I think about creating an additional fediverse presence. Consolidating makes more sense than adding more feeds, IMO.
- kseistrup 2y agoThe Betula bookmark manager and the Mycorrhiza wiki engine are among my favourite apps. They both use mycomarkup and are easy to self-host. Give them a spin.
- paulnpace 2y ago> mycomarkup Do you happen to know if it supports tabs in code blocks (renders tabs as tabs instead of spaces equivalent)? I failed to find a way to test without installing.
- kseistrup 2y agoIt does seem render TABs into TABs, yes. However, I don't think you can specify the TAB size. I looks like it's hardcoded to display as being 8 SPACEs wide. The author, bouncepaw, is very friendly. If you need a TAB to look like it's, say 4 SPACEs wide, perhaps he will accept a feature request.
- purple-leafy 2y agoLooks great, there doesn’t appear to be an associated browser extension. What are the thoughts on a browser extension alternative of this?
- danilax86 2y agoBetula has a bookmarklet, a special link which allows you to add a link to your betula directly by using a bookmark in your web browser. It automatically opens a Save link page, parses URL, Title and even description if there is one or you selected some with a cursor.
- purple-leafy 2y agoThat’s cool I saw that, bookmarklets are awesome. Have made a few in my time
- mofosyne 2y agoIt be nice if there is a way to sync this with mastodon
- flancian 2y agoIt has ActivityPub support, which in some ways (at least for me) is even better -- this means that you can e.g. follow Betula accounts from Mastodon (or Bonfire, etc.) and see what they bookmark.
- JackFr 2y agoMisread it as “federated bookmaking software for the independent web” and thought “Yes, a useful application of blockchain!”
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- EGreg 2y agoBlockchain is useful in very limited circumstances. Namely, when: 1) The central party running the website accumulates value from its growing network but doesn’t want liability for their database being hacked and corrupted (eg having someone give themselves a lot of votes or internal credits), or prevent the fear that they won’t pay out (eg when PayPal froze accounts for the tiniest reasons, or Lebanese banks, or Canada, etc.). In the past this was partially solved with reuquiring middlemen to post surety bonds in every state and registering as a money transmitter. But many marketplaces (eg Etsy, Ebay, Kickstarter, Uber Eats) today operate in a gray area when they do payouts. 2) When a community (whether local or global) are engaging in some ongoing collective action and want to make sure everyone can verify the rules were followed, without relying on fallible middlemen. The Factory Pattern allows them to easily verify that the publicly audited software was indeed not tampered with. Examples include: contests, elections, roles and permissions, escrow transactions, memberships with recurring subscriptions, disbursements to approved entities etc. In the past we just had bank accounts be a block box for most investors etc. Here are actual useful applications of blockchain: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications Bookmarking software isnt one of them.
- JackFr 2y agobookmaking != bookmarking
- immibis 2y agohttps://joincircles.net/ https://joincircles.net/ - but it suffers the same scalability problems as every other application of blockchain.
- 1317 2y agocool, but I don't see the point of it being federated. My bookmarks are just stuff I might want to see again, probably not very interesting to anyone else so I can hardly see the benefit of them going off and propagating throughout the entire known universe
- danilax86 2y agoIt is possible to disable federation if you want so. Just untick the corresponding checkbox
- rpdillon 2y agoIt's social bookmarking, likely inspired by Delicious. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
- vidarh 2y agoSometimes you may find links you think others might be interested in but don't think they're so interesting that it's worth submitting to HN or posting on your social media. But maybe it's just not for you, and that's fine too.
- SpaceGlow 2y agoAny etymology other than "female virgin" in hebrew?
- TrickyFoxy 2y ago> A birch is a thin-leaved deciduous hardwood tree of the genus Betula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch You can see that the Mastodon account is made in the style of the bark of this tree https://fosstodon.org/@betula https://fosstodon.org/@betula
- mda 2y agoBetul (with umlaut) is a common Turkish name as well, from Arabic, of similar meaning. Also name of birch tree and related things, e.g. Fomitopsis betulina for birch fungus.
- ikesau 2y agoOh nice. I have a static html page I maintain on my website. the simplicity of maintaining that can't be beat, but it would be nice to give other people an easier way of following that if they'd like.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoironically i didn't went that route because it would be a pain to add content from both computers and mobile... turn out i now think maintaining a static html or md page on a remote server is less work than dealing with all the bs of thise things. including the bookmark Managers built into browsers which are all garbage to retrieve links
- rsolva 2y agoFirefox is actually decent for retrieving taged links, you just type * in the address field and it will only show you results from your bookmarks. It has become my second brain. I have written more about my use of the built-in bookmark manager in earlier comments if you are interested. My only real gripe with Firefox is that the mobile client lacks the option to add tags. So frustrating!
- 1oooqooq 2y agoit is crap and you know it. it barely search the title. not url. not description or tags. which they add and remove from the add bookmark dialog every blue moon. btw i don't know which weird version your using because the current one doesn't have tags even in the desktop. maybe you didn't notice last random change
- rsolva 2y agoI have used this method for years and it has not changed at all in that time period. I put all my bookmarks in one folder, no hierarchy, and add the tags that is on the top of my head, and move on. I save new bookmarks several times a day and retrieve them within seconds. For me, it is a perfect system and has not changed at all while I have used it. And believe me, I have tried a lot of bookmarking solutions the last 20 years, nothing has stuck like this basic habit has. I'm have been using the latest version of FF for about 14 years, first 10 years on Arch Linux, and the last 4 years on Fedora (the Flatpak version).
- bobajeff 2y agoLately I've been more in favor of making notes with hyperlinks in markdown over bookmarks as I can search those better with vscode and will have more context to what those links are used for.
- haunter 2y agoMy main problem with bookmarks that I forget about them. I don't need a bookmark keeping service, I need one which would bring them forward when I look for something, based on context too. Something like which also makes a plain text searchable snapshot of the page? Maybe LLMs can solve that.
- dcsan 2y agoA friend is building service called memxi that scrapes thr page you bookmark and then gives u a rag like way to look up things later with LLM fuzzy search
- brunoarueira 2y agoI'd the same problem and thinking a little bit, maybe a browser extension integrated with LLMs and services like betula?
- Zambyte 2y agoI solve this by saving links in Org Roam with links to other notes for related topics. Then when I want to find things, I can look at the backlinks for some topic note. There are lots of similar tools that also support this flow; basically anything that supports note backlinks (Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq, etc.). I don't ever really use browser bookmarks, because I never found myself actually doing anything but saving links (I never referred to them later). I actually find and navigate to links I save in my notes all the time though.
- ww520 2y agoSame problem here. I have thousands of bookmarks and have no quick way to find out what I have. The bookmarks just get lost in the nested folders. I built a browser extension for myself to show all the bookmarks on one page, making it easy to access them and to search them. I called it One Page Favorites. Basically all my bookmarks/favorites on one page. Edit: Also it’s the first time for me to try to do an extension for all three browsers at the same time, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
- joshu 2y ago
- andrei-akopian 2y agoWhat's wrong with browser bookmarks?
- CPLNTN 2y agoMore powerful organization tools compared to browsers, but most importantly, I can switch browser at no cost, use multiple of them without worrying about synchronization, and access them on other PCs. I also thought it was useless until I tried it
- e40 2y agoI use bookmarks + OneTab. Seems to be the simplest solution that doesn't overload my brain. On bookmarks, if you impose some logic and organization, you can actually deal with a large number of them.
- kuschkufan 2y agodoesn't work for people that want them "federated"
- danilax86 2y agoNot every browser has tags. If you use different browsers on your pc and phone, it’s hard to have bookmarks synced
- gradientsrneat 2y agoLooks like Firefox for Android doesn't have tags, even though Firefox for desktop does.
- mesbahamin 2y agoI have long been eager to leave Pinboard. This is the first viable alternative I've seen: written in reasonable languages, storage through Sqlite and not some burdensome db server, self-hostable without any docker BS. Very promising!
- solatic 2y agoThe word "betula" in Hebrew means "virgin". Was this intentional? I almost spat out my dinner. https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%D7%91%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%94&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%D7%91%D7%A...
- renegat0x0 2y agoBookmark managers that I have found: - https://grimoire.pro/ https://grimoire.pro/ - https://bookmarkos.com/ https://bookmarkos.com/ - https://wakelet.com/ https://wakelet.com/ - https://raindrop.io/ https://raindrop.io/ - https://booky.io/ https://booky.io/ - https://www.knowies.com/ https://www.knowies.com/ - https://carrylinks.com/ https://carrylinks.com/ - https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ - https://pinalist.com/ https://pinalist.com/ - https://web.ggather.com/ https://web.ggather.com/ - https://lasso.net/ https://lasso.net/ - https://onekeep.com/ https://onekeep.com/ And the last one, is mine: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive My bookmark manager is also a web scraper.
- snapplebobapple 2y agoTheres also linkwarden. I wish linkwarden could sync select collections to/from browser bookmarks, that would make it perfectvia thier plugin
- tetrisgm 2y agoI browsed yours as I like the idea of scraping g wha ti capture. Couldn't see any screenshot or figure out if there's an android app though
- renegat0x0 2y agoSorry, no android app. Currently everything is through web interface.
- tetrisgm 2y agoThat's a shame! I'd love to have a cross device way to save my bookmarks
- 0x073 2y agoI use raindrop. First started a own project but sometimes you need just something that just works.
- FireInsight 2y agoCertainly interesting. I had a similar project under works; I first looked at ActivityPub for federation but couldn't wrap my head around it. I settled on using some naive HTTP / REST for it, ie. just having one instance send queries to other linked instances when searching the whole network. The "federation" then would be kind of a whitelist model where each admin chooses their own outward peers / who to follow. I didn't end up completing the project, though. I lost the code once due to an unfortunate home directory accident. I also worked both the front and backends at the same time, which slowed things down. Additionally, it was more of a hobby project where I was just learning the tech stack. The end goal was sort of a small federation of independent indexes of good-quality webpages, which could function as a search tool for use cases such as finding different alternatives in a certain product category. Search results would be ranked based on how many linked instances save the links. I might end up trying Betula, but it doesn't really seem to fulfill my ideal. I'm fine with Raindrop too, search works, and publishing my bookmarks is not a passion of mine.