[HN Gopher] Betula - federated bookmarking software for the inde...
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Betula - federated bookmarking software for the independent web
Author : guilherme-puida
Score : 131 points
Date : 2024-06-09 05:07 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (betula.mycorrhiza.wiki)
(TXT) w3m dump (betula.mycorrhiza.wiki)
| kseistrup wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Looks great, there doesn't appear to be an associated browser
| extension. What are the thoughts on a browser extension
| alternative of this?
| danilax86 wrote:
| Betula 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 wrote:
| That's cool I saw that, bookmarklets are awesome. Have made a
| few in my time
| mofosyne wrote:
| It be nice if there is a way to sync this with mastodon
| flancian wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Misread it as "federated bookmaking software for the independent
| web" and thought "Yes, a useful application of blockchain!"
| EGreg wrote:
| Blockchain 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
|
| Bookmarking software isnt one of them.
| JackFr wrote:
| bookmaking != bookmarking
| immibis wrote:
| https://joincircles.net/ - but it suffers the same scalability
| problems as every other application of blockchain.
| 1317 wrote:
| cool, 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 wrote:
| It is possible to disable federation if you want so. Just
| untick the corresponding checkbox
| rpdillon wrote:
| It's social bookmarking, likely inspired by Delicious.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
| vidarh wrote:
| Sometimes 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 wrote:
| Any etymology other than "female virgin" in hebrew?
| TrickyFoxy wrote:
| > A birch is a thin-leaved deciduous hardwood tree of the genus
| Betula
|
| 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
| kseistrup wrote:
| Also, it's association with "mycorrhiza" reveals the proper
| context.
| mda wrote:
| Betul (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 wrote:
| Oh 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 wrote:
| ironically 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 wrote:
| Firefox 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!
| bobajeff wrote:
| Lately 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 wrote:
| My 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.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Same 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.
| kseistrup wrote:
| Betula bookmarks can be tagged, so to the extend you can add
| relevant tags, you should be able to find bookmarks you are
| looking for.
| sodimel wrote:
| I had the same problem for my bookmarks, but I (kinda)
| answered it using 2 ways: Random link (when you don't know
| what to search but want to visit a (curated) cool link), and
| search (search in title, link, tags, description).
|
| On the paper it works great, if only you can tags those links
| and write a comprehensive description using keywords you'll
| remember. But in real life, it's something like this:
| https://links.l3m.in/en/ and the search barely work (because
| no tags nor description is not helping).
|
| The project seems cool btw!
| kal247 wrote:
| I do something similar with interactive fuzzy search (CLI),
| and the search experience is quite good for me, even with
| limited tagging. Links contain a lot a useful
| information...
| ww520 wrote:
| Thanks! My main need is to recall all the relevant browsing
| information when needed. I have hundreds of tabs opened and
| thousands of bookmarks. Sometimes I vaguely remember
| visiting a site in the past but don't recall the exact
| website and it wasn't bookmarked. So I went full force with
| feature creep (why not) and put all the open tabs,
| bookmarks, and visit history on one page. Seeing the full
| list in front of me makes it easier to browse and search.
|
| Edit: By request, here're the links to the extensions.
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-page-
| favorites/...
|
| https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/one-
| page-f...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/one-page-
| favo...
| joshu wrote:
| this is literally why i invented tagging
| ww520 wrote:
| Tags are good. Does the browsers have a standard way to
| access them? I know Firefox has something. Not sure about
| Chrome/Edge/Safari. I know some people just annotate the
| title with tags during bookmarking, like [tag1 tag2].
| Searching would definitely hit on those.
| brunoarueira wrote:
| I'd the same problem and thinking a little bit, maybe a browser
| extension integrated with LLMs and services like betula?
| bsnnkv wrote:
| You're nearly there my friend: bookmarks should be centered
| around content and not around links.[1]
|
| I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with
| bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so
| frustratingly wrong[2] that I wrote my own solution from the
| ground up in 2020[3], and I have never looked back to Pinboard,
| Instapaper or Readwise.
|
| It's honestly not that hard once you get the mental model and
| if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily
| build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.
|
| [1]: Links are definitely important metadata though!
|
| [2]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-
| wr...
|
| [3]: https://notado.app
| Groxx wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like what I really want is something like this,
| but also it saves the whole page and indexes it and that's the
| first set of results when I type into my address bar. Ideally
| self-host-able. I kinda enjoy organizing my bookmarks at times,
| but I mostly do that so I can find things... which I remember
| from content, not my organization, so I know it's mostly
| pointless to organize (for me).
|
| You can get some of that in various combinations, but I haven't
| seen all of it.
| jweatherby wrote:
| See my comment above, but maybe this tool,
| https://showboard.ca, that does most of what you're looking
| for. Except the address bar auto-complete, that would be next
| level.
| jweatherby wrote:
| I built a tool, https://showboard.ca, that does most of what
| you're looking for.
|
| It helps visualize and organize bookmarks into boards, which
| you can then share with others. It also scrapes the contents of
| the links, which is then searchable.
|
| You can see an example of it in action here:
|
| - https://showboard.ca/boards/67-engineering-leadership
|
| - https://showboard.ca/boards/15-recipes
|
| Maybe this can help?
| zeagle wrote:
| I self host wallabag and use the wallabagger extension on my
| machines. Works well and doesn't cost me anything on top of
| what I already have.
| FireInsight wrote:
| My main problem is similar:
|
| - I want tags in my bookmarks.
|
| - Firefox no logger supports tagged bookmarks.
|
| - -> I need to use a third-party service (Raindrop) for
| bookmarking.
|
| - Common web searches in the Firefox address bar do not search
| my bookmarks at the same time, as they would normally. I need
| to directly use Raindrop to search specifically from my
| bookmarks.
|
| - -> I might save useful things but forget about them entirely,
| and end up searching for them again.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > - Firefox no logger supports tagged bookmarks.
|
| How so? You can still set tags on bookmarks, and those tags
| get matched by text you type in the address bar to determine
| what bookmarks to show you.
|
| > Common web searches in the Firefox address bar do not
| search my bookmarks at the same time, as they would normally.
|
| Yeah, that's something I would love Firefox to add: a local
| search index for full-content search of every page in my
| bookmarks and history, based on my cache.
| FireInsight wrote:
| Oh, I'm sorry, I mixed it up. Firefox no longer supports
| bookmarks with descriptions, which I would also like to
| have. Firefox on desktop has tags, but the mobile version
| doesn't.
| FireInsight wrote:
| https://mymind.com/ is based on AI analysis of page content, or
| something like that. I've never been able to use their product
| because they require a Google or Apple account.
|
| https://raindrop.io/ apparently also has full-text search for
| page contents as a paid feature. I'm on the free tier and
| haven't tried it either.
| andrei-akopian wrote:
| What's wrong with browser bookmarks?
| e40 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| doesn't work for people that want them "federated"
| danilax86 wrote:
| Not every browser has tags. If you use different browsers on
| your pc and phone, it's hard to have bookmarks synced
| mesbahamin wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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%A...
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Bookmark managers that I have found:
|
| - https://grimoire.pro/
|
| - https://bookmarkos.com/
|
| - https://wakelet.com/
|
| - https://raindrop.io/
|
| - https://booky.io/
|
| - https://www.knowies.com/
|
| - https://carrylinks.com/
|
| - https://www.zotero.org/
|
| - https://pinalist.com/
|
| - https://web.ggather.com/
|
| - https://lasso.net/
|
| - https://onekeep.com/
|
| And the last one, is mine: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-
| link-archive
|
| My bookmark manager is also a web scraper.
| FireInsight wrote:
| Certainly 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.
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