I don't have any recommendations to share unfortunately, but just wanted to echo frustation with the state of bookmark management solutions. They're all weirdly bad, even the paid ones. Throwing a read-it-later app into the mix can help but for me just spreads the same set of problems to a slightly different surface.
It seems like nobody has taken the time to sit down and give bookmarks a thorough rethink to fit more demanding use cases, which feels a little insane to me given how essential they are for maintaining sanity on the web.
🎶 "I felt he found my letters, and read each one out loud" 🎶
Well said. I'm also frustrated that I can't quite visualise what a good system would look like. On one hand, I want to manage bookmarks, but on the other I more want to organise the ideas/reasons for storing them in the first place.
Have you had any thoughts on what your dream application would look like and how it would work?
A few ideas have been bouncing around in my head, but I've not had the time to stitch them together into something coherent.
Probably the things that stand out the most is how inflexible managers are when it comes to offering different ways to browse and that most aren't really designed for high volume. Just addressing those two things would probably result in a greatly improved experience.
Yeah. One issue I have with most of the options is that I can only browse one category at a time. start.me does help that by showing multiple folders at a time, but I won't know for a while how that scales.
I ended up building myself a tag-based bookmarking website. I can search for multiple tags at a time, and links with more matching tags get sorted to the top of the search. There is no enforced organisation system, just tags, but I can usually find the things I'm looking for with 3-4. From reading the replies here, I don't think it would solve the problem, but it is a different idea for how to organise things.
The site is tied to my IRL name, so I am hesitant about sharing it here. I also plan on rewriting it some time in the future, so I don't want to have people relying on it when I don't even know what its future is. At least when it's my own data I can dump the database and write a script to do whatever I like with it.
I used to have issues with that as well, so I ended up spending the past few years building a new tab and bookmark management solution, which I plan on releasing in a month or two hopefully.
It's basically an outliner but for tabs and bookmarks. You get nested folders, drag and drop, filters, tags, search, etc.
Main strengths:
divide & conquer (break down complex tasks into simple ones with as many levels of nested folders as you need, focus on a single task at once by showing only a given folder at a time)
up-to-date folders (tabs and bookmarks are synchronized constantly, so you get only one up-to-date version of your bookmarks instead of multiple snapshots of the same research session: you don't save your bookmarks at the end of the day and end up with multiple folders with duplicates, you just have an up-to-date version of your folders with your latest bookmarks, a single snapshot over multiple ones so to speak).
less friction (save a tab in one click, save all your tabs and close your browser in one click, etc.)
I'm happy to take any kind of feedback. Please let me know what you guys actually need and I'd love to build it for you.
I'm actually looking for early users to try the beta version before the official launch, so if anyone wants early access, send me a DM with a Gmail email address (it has to be Gmail) and I'll add you to the private beta for Chrome. Otherwise you can also subscribe to the waiting list to get an email at launch.
I know you mention specifically that you struggle with the concept of a "second brain" but you use raindrop as an example for that, which I think is a poor one. I think Obsidian is what you're looking for.
Imo, you are at a point where you probably could really do with a second brain, and Obsidian would let you actually organize one in a way that works even for someone like you who struggles with brain fog. I have AHDH myself and use it to track a bunch of stuff I constantly have to reference at my job.
I think people tend to feel overwhelmed when their knowledge base gets too big (and it's easy to get there), and creating more folders and subfolders only adds to the mess at that point. But Obsidian remidies this by actually creating a visual tree with all your knowledge, with clusters representing larger themes and each branch a topic in that theme. You don't have to create folders with subfolders within subfolders, all you need is to reference your notes to a subject and obsidian does the branching/sorting all for you.
Consider watching this video on the simplest way to create a second brain with Obsidian. It's what got me started on my second brain journey. It makes it very very simple to grasp and gives you a super easy to follow base structure (which you can always adapt but it's already so barebones that there's hardly anything to cut). There are no complicated plug-ins or weird folder structures, you just create a note, tag it, and Obsidian does the rest. No moving something into subfolders, no creating subfolders, just new note, tag, hit save. It really opened my eyes to how one can be efficient with storing and referencing their knowledge while being as lazy as possible.
The main caveat for you is that you want to store web pages rather than just write notes, but there are plenty of ways to save a web page to Obsidian or if nothing else, you can just make a note with a url in it.
If you were already familiar with all this or have seen that video I'm sorry, but your post really gave me the notion that you haven't tried this approach yet.
I can't guarantee it will work for you, but I would highly suggest you give it a try if your goal is to have your own easily accessible knowledge base.
Holy shit that video was for me. How the opening describes the toxic perfectionism driven by the options out there is literally what happens to me all the time, including the last time I tried obsidian. Thanks for sharing lol
Thank you for taking the time there, I appreciate it. I haven't used raindrop - I'm mixing it up with readwise. I saw all these interconnected apps where one is for bookmarks, another imports those where they can be highlighted and then the e-reader syncs those ... it was just too much.
I'm familiar with the graph view from dabbling with Obsidian and using Anytype moreso. It's not particularly helpful in this case, because there aren't that many connections between articles. It would have been useful for my degree where I needed to see connections between concepts, but here I just need to store references to facts and evidence that kind of exist in parallel.
Again, thank you. If I'm ever asked about Obsidian, I'll link them to your post and the video you linked to.
Edit; you know, I was just saying in another comment that moreso that organising bookmarks, I actually want to organise ideas that are reference in those articles (supporting data or quotes that succinctly convey the seriousness of a topic, when it's being minimised online). Maybe Obsidian and the graph are worth exploring more. There's also another view - I forget what it's called, maybe canvas or storyboard. I'll watch your video in full.
For example, "80% of anti-trans groups in the USA receive fossil fuel funding" is one I remember off the top of my head. I want to be able to find that fact in my store and back the statement up with a link to an article at short notice. Then share it online.
It's not particularly helpful in this case, because there aren't that many connections between articles
The "connections" can be anything you want. They don't have to be an overarching topic, specifically. They also don't have to be literal references to other notes. That's what that video I linked goes into. All you need is to create an empty "node" that's titled whatever you want (Can be a topic, a date, a location, a website name, whatever) and then link other actual notes with content to it. Those "nodes" essentially replace the traditional folder and make your knowledge tree much more flexible, allowing you to not only constantly add to it without feeling overwhelmed (since you just make a new note and tag it, you don't need to manually sort it anywhere) but also interconnect one note to multiple things, making the overarching structure very easy to grasp at a glance.
For example, since I work in translation, I have an empty note titled "sound effects", and then I have a bunch of separate notes connecting to it for different types of sound effects. When I open the graph view, I know that the large cluster of notes surrounding the "sound effects" node will have every single note I've ever created containing sound effects.
For example, "80% of anti-trans groups in the USA receive fossil fuel funding" is one I remember off the top of my head. I want to be able to find that fact in my store and back the statement up with a link to an article at short notice. Then share it online.
With the approach I mentioned, you could create a note titled exactly that (with a link or links to whatever you want), then link it to multiple empty notes labeled, for example "USA" "LGBTQ" "Trans" "fossil fuels". Then, in your graph view, all you would need to know is that you're looking for something that's related to one or multiple of those 4 things (or all of them), and you will see the nodes visually connecting to them, making it super easy to track down the one you want. You can even select all the nodes that you know apply and only the notes that connect to them will be highlighted. This is how I easily find anything in my giant cluster of knowledge. The big nodes will also display all the references they're tied to when you open them, so you can just click one to open it and then look through the list of references if you prefer that.
This would be a million times harder to do for me with a bookmark manager and tags, because there's no visual indicator, only my memory to help me. Not to mention the lack of multiple connections to show me other related stuff I might have missed that could be relevant for that moment.
Again, I can't promise this is the perfect approach for you, but I really really do think it's worth exploring.
I noticed that section in the video where he used the [[ and ]] to make a kind of tag that can contain text (a node?). It was a lot of info so I'll need to rewatch it, but I'm definitely going to try Obsidian this weekend alongside Wallabag and start.me.
I expect that start.me will be helpful for the initial layout, but that I'll have to move on to one of the other two as my page count grows, and I need more features than just the links themselves . Thank you again, I really appreciate the help!
I noticed that section in the video where he used the [[ and ]] to make a kind of tag that can contain text (a node?)
Yes, in obsidian you can use square brackets to create references to other notes in your vault. And if a note with that name doesn't exist, it will be automatically created when you create the reference and click on it.
Normally you would use these references to refer to other real notes, sort of like in a wiki, but you can also cleverly employ this function to reference an empty note that acts as a center anchor for all other related notes (basically like an index, but you don't need to manually create it or keep it updated, it does that on its own).
Basically it's using Obsidian's reference function as a very intelligent tag system that indexes and interconnects your notes.
Obsidian does have a separate tag system wish hashtags, but they are far less capable compared to references, at least for this purpose (mainly because you can update a reference and that update populates everywhere, which is not true for tags. Plus you can't open a tag as its own note to edit it, which is useful if you want to add comments to it or organize it in some particular way).
Hear hear! I recently went through this too. I kept trying to organize my bookmarks in Firefox but found it cumbersome and hard to do. Something about them being hidden in folders and only accessible as a list made it difficult to get a good overview of everything.
After trying out several different things, I landed on start.me. It's meant as a homepage for your browser, but I'm using it as, essentially, a visual bookmarks manager. Being able to spread them all out helped me sort and organize them so much easier.
I also like that I can separate them out into different pages, which has helped me sort my bookmarks by function. My first page is like, everyday navigation stuff: Tildes, AP, Steam, Weather, etc. It also has an "Interesting Links Queue" which is where I drop things that look cool to come back to later.
My second page has different categories of "sometimes" bookmarks -- things that are more situational.
My third page is my "Bookmark Basement", which are links that I may or may not ever use again, but I want to have them in case I do need them. There are things that, if I don't keep bookmarked, I don't necessarily trust that I'll be able to find them again. I have stuff in there from years ago.
Before, all of these were all essentially sharing the same space in my Firefox bookmarks. I had folders and separators and whatnot, but it still felt cluttered. I'm very happy that I'm now able to separate them out.
It is a paid service, but I'll also add that they have a lifetime option that they don't advertise on their pricing breakdown. For me, it was $100 USD, and after using it for a bit, I was happy to pay it. I'd much rather pay a one-time fee than add yet another subscription.
I felt comfortable paying for it because I liked their privacy policy which says that they make money from me directly rather than selling my data to others. That feels especially important given how uniquely personal and illuminating an individual's bookmarks are. I don't necessarily trust that some of the other services out there aren't data mining their users.
Two caveats:
It's definitely a desktop-first platform. Instead of reflowing the site for mobile, it loads the desktop site. They admittedly do have an app, but I haven't tried it out and don't really feel like I need or want a separate app for my bookmarks.
You can export what you've put into start.me in case you ever needed to get everything out, but I don't think you can keep what you're putting in synced with your browser. So, I put all my bookmarks into it and now use that site as my bookmark manager, rather than keeping them in Firefox directly. It's essentially a replacement, rather than working in tandem.
Oh, this is great. Thank you so much for this. I haven't seen such a tidy visual layout for bookmarks before (Notion tends to give each one too much space for this exact purpose).
I think you've completely solved my problem, because I'm either going to go with start.me or something similar based on a search of self-hosted alternatives.
Here are some alternatives I've found for anyone interested:
Linkding, Linkwarden, Kara-keep, Homer.
But they don't have the layout that start.me has. Thanks again for the detailed comment, I'm signing up now!
So, I put all my bookmarks into it and now use that site as my bookmark manager, rather than keeping them in Firefox directly. It's essentially a replacement, rather than working in tandem.
Quick note: my tab manager works in tandem with the browser, if that's what you'd like. The tabs and bookmarks are synced in the browser as you browse.
Also, why did it help to use pages instead of folders to separate the different "spaces" for your bookmarks?
Oh, I use folders too within each page. I just like having the separation between the different "types" of bookmarks. In particular, I like having my main, most-used start page be relatively clean, while my "Basement" is where I can throw a lot of different things without much care for how they're organized. It's like my bookmarks junk drawer, if you will.
I’m sure you’ve seen Obsidian.md, and I’ve got only a little time before a class, so I’ll just mention that I recently realized that syncing it between macOS and iOS was much easier than i long thought. I just moved my “vault” (collection of markdown/text files) to iCloud folder. Then from the obsidian app on both platforms I linked that same iCloud folder. Works just fine. Both apps are good.
You can decide if the apps overall can help you, keeping in mind there are lots of plugins for additional features but start simple. But that syncing was a hurdle for me until I took more than two seconds actually investigating it— there are a lot of different methods of varying complexity that would make my eyes glaze over.
Thanks for squeezing in a comment before your class :) The canvas view is actually close to what I'm looking for. It's not quite right, but you're right that I could just be a plugin away from what I need. For my needs, start.me seems to suit better, but I'll explore Obsidian more in parallel. Thanks again!
This might be not exactly what you're looking for since it's not available for iOS as far as I know (unless Firefox iOS has extensions?) but it's great for desktop. I gave up on using folders or tags or any complicated management of links. I found that it took me way too long to organize my links and it was a little tedious. I use the OneTab extension on Chrome and Firefox. It saves all the open links in a window and I can rename it or star it, which is pinning it at the top.
On an average day, I might have 20-40 tabs that I open that I might want to go back to but don't at the moment, so at the end of the day, I just use OneTab to clean it up. Usually, it's links based around a certain topic, so I just rename the collection of links. Later, when I have time, I go back and go through what's there and I can delete individual links if I'm done with them or otherwise, I just keep them saved forever.
I do use the second brain system to process what I've learned or preserve important information with Obsidian. For regular browsing though, OneTab has been my go-to for a while. It also offers sharing of links as pages and exporting the data.
Thanks for this. I've used OneTab in the past and found it helpful. I should probably revisit it since I've moved on from using the web browser purely for access to entertainment. It could help me filter what I decide to keep before adding it to whatever system I end up going with. Thanks again.
Since it's articles that you're primarily wanting to sort through, have you looked at read-it-later apps? I've spun up a self-hosted instance of Wallabag for myself, and the UI it presents is great for being able to sift through and then read articles in a distraction-minimal environment. There are plenty of options available in this space, so self-hosting is absolutely not a requirement.
I moved from Instapaper to Omnivore, and then Omnivore shut down. So I do like these kinds of systems.
It's almost perfect, but like many of the alternatives I've explored, I can only browse one category at a time. With start.me I can see an overview of all the categories. I'm not sure if that actually matters ... Wallabag also seems to supports highlighting which is extremely helpful for quickly seeing the salient part of the article that motivated me to save it in the first place. Thanks, I need to seriously consider this.
I feel like this pithy comment will drown in the valuable Tildes advice, but my recent job drowned me in documents that I sometimes-regularly referenced. I looked into a lot of productivity managers and I hated the overhead in most of them.
My saving grace was the Arc Browser. It exchanges the idea of bookmarks and tabs to make you think critically about whether a tab is really something worth keeping long-term (ie a bookmark). The integration is relatively seamless for those who have to sift through a constant stream of URLs. If you have a set list of sites you alway use then it’s easy to import bookmarks but you may not be the target audience of the browser.
I feel the need to comment that Atlassian acquired The Browser Company, which manages Arc, and has grandiose ideals of making a truly AI agentic browser (the Dia browser), leaving Arc to rot. That being said, even if the browser lacks development, I really appreciate the mental mode of thinking about browser tabs ephemerally (ie kill after 24 hours).
Check out mymind. They have incredible automatic tagging capabilities, so you can just find anything you need in your bookmarks through search (but of course, there's manual organization as well). It's a great product.
There's also a similar tool called Karakeep, which is open source and self-hostable.
ButteredToast | a day ago
I don't have any recommendations to share unfortunately, but just wanted to echo frustation with the state of bookmark management solutions. They're all weirdly bad, even the paid ones. Throwing a read-it-later app into the mix can help but for me just spreads the same set of problems to a slightly different surface.
It seems like nobody has taken the time to sit down and give bookmarks a thorough rethink to fit more demanding use cases, which feels a little insane to me given how essential they are for maintaining sanity on the web.
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | a day ago
🎶 "I felt he found my letters, and read each one out loud" 🎶
Well said. I'm also frustrated that I can't quite visualise what a good system would look like. On one hand, I want to manage bookmarks, but on the other I more want to organise the ideas/reasons for storing them in the first place.
Have you had any thoughts on what your dream application would look like and how it would work?
ButteredToast | a day ago
A few ideas have been bouncing around in my head, but I've not had the time to stitch them together into something coherent.
Probably the things that stand out the most is how inflexible managers are when it comes to offering different ways to browse and that most aren't really designed for high volume. Just addressing those two things would probably result in a greatly improved experience.
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | a day ago
Yeah. One issue I have with most of the options is that I can only browse one category at a time. start.me does help that by showing multiple folders at a time, but I won't know for a while how that scales.
secret_online | 21 hours ago
I ended up building myself a tag-based bookmarking website. I can search for multiple tags at a time, and links with more matching tags get sorted to the top of the search. There is no enforced organisation system, just tags, but I can usually find the things I'm looking for with 3-4. From reading the replies here, I don't think it would solve the problem, but it is a different idea for how to organise things.
The site is tied to my IRL name, so I am hesitant about sharing it here. I also plan on rewriting it some time in the future, so I don't want to have people relying on it when I don't even know what its future is. At least when it's my own data I can dump the database and write a script to do whatever I like with it.
fnulare | 12 hours ago
Tags (and tag clouds even more so) are such a good complementary tool to hyperlinks to externalise memory.
Why didn't that stick as a paradigm?
hydravion | 20 hours ago
I intend to add split-screen to my tab manager at some point, so you should be able to work with different folders at a time.
hydravion | 20 hours ago
I used to have issues with that as well, so I ended up spending the past few years building a new tab and bookmark management solution, which I plan on releasing in a month or two hopefully.
It's basically an outliner but for tabs and bookmarks. You get nested folders, drag and drop, filters, tags, search, etc.
Main strengths:
I'm happy to take any kind of feedback. Please let me know what you guys actually need and I'd love to build it for you.
I'm actually looking for early users to try the beta version before the official launch, so if anyone wants early access, send me a DM with a Gmail email address (it has to be Gmail) and I'll add you to the private beta for Chrome. Otherwise you can also subscribe to the waiting list to get an email at launch.
Check it out here.
Sheep | a day ago
I know you mention specifically that you struggle with the concept of a "second brain" but you use raindrop as an example for that, which I think is a poor one. I think Obsidian is what you're looking for.
Imo, you are at a point where you probably could really do with a second brain, and Obsidian would let you actually organize one in a way that works even for someone like you who struggles with brain fog. I have AHDH myself and use it to track a bunch of stuff I constantly have to reference at my job.
I think people tend to feel overwhelmed when their knowledge base gets too big (and it's easy to get there), and creating more folders and subfolders only adds to the mess at that point. But Obsidian remidies this by actually creating a visual tree with all your knowledge, with clusters representing larger themes and each branch a topic in that theme. You don't have to create folders with subfolders within subfolders, all you need is to reference your notes to a subject and obsidian does the branching/sorting all for you.
Consider watching this video on the simplest way to create a second brain with Obsidian. It's what got me started on my second brain journey. It makes it very very simple to grasp and gives you a super easy to follow base structure (which you can always adapt but it's already so barebones that there's hardly anything to cut). There are no complicated plug-ins or weird folder structures, you just create a note, tag it, and Obsidian does the rest. No moving something into subfolders, no creating subfolders, just new note, tag, hit save. It really opened my eyes to how one can be efficient with storing and referencing their knowledge while being as lazy as possible.
The main caveat for you is that you want to store web pages rather than just write notes, but there are plenty of ways to save a web page to Obsidian or if nothing else, you can just make a note with a url in it.
If you were already familiar with all this or have seen that video I'm sorry, but your post really gave me the notion that you haven't tried this approach yet.
I can't guarantee it will work for you, but I would highly suggest you give it a try if your goal is to have your own easily accessible knowledge base.
Aerrol | a day ago
Holy shit that video was for me. How the opening describes the toxic perfectionism driven by the options out there is literally what happens to me all the time, including the last time I tried obsidian. Thanks for sharing lol
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | a day ago
Thank you for taking the time there, I appreciate it. I haven't used raindrop - I'm mixing it up with readwise. I saw all these interconnected apps where one is for bookmarks, another imports those where they can be highlighted and then the e-reader syncs those ... it was just too much.
I'm familiar with the graph view from dabbling with Obsidian and using Anytype moreso. It's not particularly helpful in this case, because there aren't that many connections between articles. It would have been useful for my degree where I needed to see connections between concepts, but here I just need to store references to facts and evidence that kind of exist in parallel.
Again, thank you. If I'm ever asked about Obsidian, I'll link them to your post and the video you linked to.
Edit; you know, I was just saying in another comment that moreso that organising bookmarks, I actually want to organise ideas that are reference in those articles (supporting data or quotes that succinctly convey the seriousness of a topic, when it's being minimised online). Maybe Obsidian and the graph are worth exploring more. There's also another view - I forget what it's called, maybe canvas or storyboard. I'll watch your video in full.
For example, "80% of anti-trans groups in the USA receive fossil fuel funding" is one I remember off the top of my head. I want to be able to find that fact in my store and back the statement up with a link to an article at short notice. Then share it online.
Sheep | a day ago
The "connections" can be anything you want. They don't have to be an overarching topic, specifically. They also don't have to be literal references to other notes. That's what that video I linked goes into. All you need is to create an empty "node" that's titled whatever you want (Can be a topic, a date, a location, a website name, whatever) and then link other actual notes with content to it. Those "nodes" essentially replace the traditional folder and make your knowledge tree much more flexible, allowing you to not only constantly add to it without feeling overwhelmed (since you just make a new note and tag it, you don't need to manually sort it anywhere) but also interconnect one note to multiple things, making the overarching structure very easy to grasp at a glance.
For example, since I work in translation, I have an empty note titled "sound effects", and then I have a bunch of separate notes connecting to it for different types of sound effects. When I open the graph view, I know that the large cluster of notes surrounding the "sound effects" node will have every single note I've ever created containing sound effects.
With the approach I mentioned, you could create a note titled exactly that (with a link or links to whatever you want), then link it to multiple empty notes labeled, for example "USA" "LGBTQ" "Trans" "fossil fuels". Then, in your graph view, all you would need to know is that you're looking for something that's related to one or multiple of those 4 things (or all of them), and you will see the nodes visually connecting to them, making it super easy to track down the one you want. You can even select all the nodes that you know apply and only the notes that connect to them will be highlighted. This is how I easily find anything in my giant cluster of knowledge. The big nodes will also display all the references they're tied to when you open them, so you can just click one to open it and then look through the list of references if you prefer that.
This would be a million times harder to do for me with a bookmark manager and tags, because there's no visual indicator, only my memory to help me. Not to mention the lack of multiple connections to show me other related stuff I might have missed that could be relevant for that moment.
Again, I can't promise this is the perfect approach for you, but I really really do think it's worth exploring.
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | 21 hours ago
I noticed that section in the video where he used the [[ and ]] to make a kind of tag that can contain text (a node?). It was a lot of info so I'll need to rewatch it, but I'm definitely going to try Obsidian this weekend alongside Wallabag and start.me.
I expect that start.me will be helpful for the initial layout, but that I'll have to move on to one of the other two as my page count grows, and I need more features than just the links themselves . Thank you again, I really appreciate the help!
Sheep | 21 hours ago
Yes, in obsidian you can use square brackets to create references to other notes in your vault. And if a note with that name doesn't exist, it will be automatically created when you create the reference and click on it.
Normally you would use these references to refer to other real notes, sort of like in a wiki, but you can also cleverly employ this function to reference an empty note that acts as a center anchor for all other related notes (basically like an index, but you don't need to manually create it or keep it updated, it does that on its own).
Basically it's using Obsidian's reference function as a very intelligent tag system that indexes and interconnects your notes.
Obsidian does have a separate tag system wish hashtags, but they are far less capable compared to references, at least for this purpose (mainly because you can update a reference and that update populates everywhere, which is not true for tags. Plus you can't open a tag as its own note to edit it, which is useful if you want to add comments to it or organize it in some particular way).
Good luck!
kfwyre | a day ago
Hear hear! I recently went through this too. I kept trying to organize my bookmarks in Firefox but found it cumbersome and hard to do. Something about them being hidden in folders and only accessible as a list made it difficult to get a good overview of everything.
After trying out several different things, I landed on start.me. It's meant as a homepage for your browser, but I'm using it as, essentially, a visual bookmarks manager. Being able to spread them all out helped me sort and organize them so much easier.
I also like that I can separate them out into different pages, which has helped me sort my bookmarks by function. My first page is like, everyday navigation stuff: Tildes, AP, Steam, Weather, etc. It also has an "Interesting Links Queue" which is where I drop things that look cool to come back to later.
My second page has different categories of "sometimes" bookmarks -- things that are more situational.
My third page is my "Bookmark Basement", which are links that I may or may not ever use again, but I want to have them in case I do need them. There are things that, if I don't keep bookmarked, I don't necessarily trust that I'll be able to find them again. I have stuff in there from years ago.
Before, all of these were all essentially sharing the same space in my Firefox bookmarks. I had folders and separators and whatnot, but it still felt cluttered. I'm very happy that I'm now able to separate them out.
It is a paid service, but I'll also add that they have a lifetime option that they don't advertise on their pricing breakdown. For me, it was $100 USD, and after using it for a bit, I was happy to pay it. I'd much rather pay a one-time fee than add yet another subscription.
I felt comfortable paying for it because I liked their privacy policy which says that they make money from me directly rather than selling my data to others. That feels especially important given how uniquely personal and illuminating an individual's bookmarks are. I don't necessarily trust that some of the other services out there aren't data mining their users.
Two caveats:
It's definitely a desktop-first platform. Instead of reflowing the site for mobile, it loads the desktop site. They admittedly do have an app, but I haven't tried it out and don't really feel like I need or want a separate app for my bookmarks.
You can export what you've put into start.me in case you ever needed to get everything out, but I don't think you can keep what you're putting in synced with your browser. So, I put all my bookmarks into it and now use that site as my bookmark manager, rather than keeping them in Firefox directly. It's essentially a replacement, rather than working in tandem.
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | a day ago
Oh, this is great. Thank you so much for this. I haven't seen such a tidy visual layout for bookmarks before (Notion tends to give each one too much space for this exact purpose).
I think you've completely solved my problem, because I'm either going to go with start.me or something similar based on a search of self-hosted alternatives.
Here are some alternatives I've found for anyone interested:
But they don't have the layout that start.me has. Thanks again for the detailed comment, I'm signing up now!
hydravion | 20 hours ago
Quick note: my tab manager works in tandem with the browser, if that's what you'd like. The tabs and bookmarks are synced in the browser as you browse.
Also, why did it help to use pages instead of folders to separate the different "spaces" for your bookmarks?
kfwyre | 8 hours ago
Oh, I use folders too within each page. I just like having the separation between the different "types" of bookmarks. In particular, I like having my main, most-used start page be relatively clean, while my "Basement" is where I can throw a lot of different things without much care for how they're organized. It's like my bookmarks junk drawer, if you will.
monarda | 18 hours ago
Can you link to the lifetime option?
kfwyre | 8 hours ago
For me, it was one of the options when I went to pay. I can't find anything on the site directly that mentions it.
In trying to find a page on it, I did find this StackSocial deal for $50 USD instead of $100, so it looks like I overpaid.
Gazook89 | a day ago
I’m sure you’ve seen Obsidian.md, and I’ve got only a little time before a class, so I’ll just mention that I recently realized that syncing it between macOS and iOS was much easier than i long thought. I just moved my “vault” (collection of markdown/text files) to iCloud folder. Then from the obsidian app on both platforms I linked that same iCloud folder. Works just fine. Both apps are good.
You can decide if the apps overall can help you, keeping in mind there are lots of plugins for additional features but start simple. But that syncing was a hurdle for me until I took more than two seconds actually investigating it— there are a lot of different methods of varying complexity that would make my eyes glaze over.
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | a day ago
Thanks for squeezing in a comment before your class :) The canvas view is actually close to what I'm looking for. It's not quite right, but you're right that I could just be a plugin away from what I need. For my needs, start.me seems to suit better, but I'll explore Obsidian more in parallel. Thanks again!
aetherious | a day ago
This might be not exactly what you're looking for since it's not available for iOS as far as I know (unless Firefox iOS has extensions?) but it's great for desktop. I gave up on using folders or tags or any complicated management of links. I found that it took me way too long to organize my links and it was a little tedious. I use the OneTab extension on Chrome and Firefox. It saves all the open links in a window and I can rename it or star it, which is pinning it at the top.
On an average day, I might have 20-40 tabs that I open that I might want to go back to but don't at the moment, so at the end of the day, I just use OneTab to clean it up. Usually, it's links based around a certain topic, so I just rename the collection of links. Later, when I have time, I go back and go through what's there and I can delete individual links if I'm done with them or otherwise, I just keep them saved forever.
I do use the second brain system to process what I've learned or preserve important information with Obsidian. For regular browsing though, OneTab has been my go-to for a while. It also offers sharing of links as pages and exporting the data.
Gazook89 | a day ago
The Kagi Orion browser is safari-based, but allows both chrome and Firefox extensions.
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | a day ago
Thanks for this. I've used OneTab in the past and found it helpful. I should probably revisit it since I've moved on from using the web browser purely for access to entertainment. It could help me filter what I decide to keep before adding it to whatever system I end up going with. Thanks again.
MetaMoss | a day ago
Since it's articles that you're primarily wanting to sort through, have you looked at read-it-later apps? I've spun up a self-hosted instance of Wallabag for myself, and the UI it presents is great for being able to sift through and then read articles in a distraction-minimal environment. There are plenty of options available in this space, so self-hosting is absolutely not a requirement.
[OP] FarraigePlaisteach | a day ago
I moved from Instapaper to Omnivore, and then Omnivore shut down. So I do like these kinds of systems.
It's almost perfect, but like many of the alternatives I've explored, I can only browse one category at a time. With start.me I can see an overview of all the categories. I'm not sure if that actually matters ... Wallabag also seems to supports highlighting which is extremely helpful for quickly seeing the salient part of the article that motivated me to save it in the first place. Thanks, I need to seriously consider this.
UniquelyGeneric | 21 hours ago
I feel like this pithy comment will drown in the valuable Tildes advice, but my recent job drowned me in documents that I sometimes-regularly referenced. I looked into a lot of productivity managers and I hated the overhead in most of them.
My saving grace was the Arc Browser. It exchanges the idea of bookmarks and tabs to make you think critically about whether a tab is really something worth keeping long-term (ie a bookmark). The integration is relatively seamless for those who have to sift through a constant stream of URLs. If you have a set list of sites you alway use then it’s easy to import bookmarks but you may not be the target audience of the browser.
I feel the need to comment that Atlassian acquired The Browser Company, which manages Arc, and has grandiose ideals of making a truly AI agentic browser (the Dia browser), leaving Arc to rot. That being said, even if the browser lacks development, I really appreciate the mental mode of thinking about browser tabs ephemerally (ie kill after 24 hours).
fxgn | 12 hours ago
Check out mymind. They have incredible automatic tagging capabilities, so you can just find anything you need in your bookmarks through search (but of course, there's manual organization as well). It's a great product.
There's also a similar tool called Karakeep, which is open source and self-hostable.