[HN Gopher] Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-t...
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Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-tagging and page
archival
Author : FireInsight
Score : 193 points
Date : 2025-05-01 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (linkwarden.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (linkwarden.app)
| FireInsight wrote:
| No experience with this yet, but looking to upgrade from
| Linkding. Main features I'm looking forward to is syncing the
| bookmarks with native browsers bookmarks through Floccus, and
| being able to make highlights on the articles I save.
| belter wrote:
| As of this moment...This post has 4 points and 2 comments...How
| does it make to number 3 on HN page?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Velocity. Obviously, I don't really know and speculating only.
| Still, the project does look nice. I personally use archivebox,
| but I will admit this looks a lot more polished.
| human_llm wrote:
| This looks interesting. How feature-crippled is the self hosted
| version?
| dugite-code wrote:
| Not at all as far as I am aware. I use floccus to sync my
| bookmarks to it and it does the job quite well
| mikae1 wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://www.linkace.org/ (my fave)
|
| https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
|
| https://github.com/jonschoning/espial
|
| https://motd.co/2023/09/postmarks-launch/
|
| https://betula.mycorrhiza.wiki/
|
| https://linkhut.org/
| tummler wrote:
| Also: https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
| s17tnet wrote:
| https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
| jamroom wrote:
| I've tried most archiving/bookmarking self hosted solutions I
| could find and the one I like the best is:
|
| https://readeck.org/en/
| xnx wrote:
| I have yet to find anything that has the effort vs. results
| benefit of CTRL+S -> "Webpage, Single File (*.mhtml)". Even works
| on mobile.
| FireInsight wrote:
| Tagging, full-text search, page highlights, a nice UI,... You
| might call that bloat, I don't. Besides, I could not find any
| equivalent to ctrl-s the webpage on mobile Firefox.
| xnx wrote:
| > I could not find any equivalent to ctrl-s the webpage on
| mobile Firefox.
|
| True. There used to be an extension that enabled the hidden
| code path, but that stopped working years ago. I switched to
| Kiwi browser.
| virtualcharles wrote:
| As a paid product, has anyone used Raindrop as well and have
| opinions/comparisons? And on the self hosted side, vs Hoarder?
|
| I've been considering switching from Raindrop to a self hosted
| option, but while I like self hosting I'm also leaning towards
| just paying someone to handle this particular service for me.
| regularjack wrote:
| I also use raindrop, but been looking at self-hosted
| alternatives as raindrop does not encrypt the data, so I can't
| use it for work stuff.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I tried Raindrop, but it was not usable to me because it
| constantly logged you out.
| flashblaze wrote:
| I have been using Raindrop and like it quite a bit
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I pay for Raindrop, very useful to have someone else run it,
| minimal cost.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I've never heard of raindrop and it looks cool but I see the
| .ru in one of their screenshots -- are they based in Russia?
| Any concerns with doing business with a Russian company, in the
| context of sanctions etc.?
| spiffotron wrote:
| I used to use raindrop however found it a bit bloated with
| features I never use, I've switched to selfhosting linkding:
| https://linkding.link and enjoy the much more minimal
| experience
| nickfixit wrote:
| I like hoarder(karakeep). It's got an API and mcp server as well
| to play with now locally and self hosted. I'll check this out as
| well.
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| Hello everyone, I'm the main developer behind Linkwarden. Glad to
| see it getting some attention here!
|
| Some key features of the app (at the moment):
|
| - Text highlighting
|
| - Full page archival
|
| - Full content search
|
| - Optional local AI tagging
|
| - Sync with browser (using Floccus)
|
| - Collaborative
|
| Also, for anyone wondering, all features from the cloud plan are
| available to self-hosted users :)
| yapyap wrote:
| Very very neat!
|
| a question arose for me though: if the AI tagging is self
| hostable as well, how taxing is it for the hardware, what would
| the minimum viable hardware be?
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| Thanks! A lightweight model like the phi3:mini-4k is enough
| for this feature.[1]
|
| It's worth mentioning that you can also use external
| providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to tag the links for you.
|
| [1]: https://docs.linkwarden.app/self-hosting/ai-worker
| dikdok wrote:
| > Full page archival
|
| Does it grab the DOM from my browser as it sees it? Or is it a
| separate request? If so, how does it deal with authentication?
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| So there are different ways it archives a webpage.
|
| It currently stores the full webpages as a single html file,
| a screenshot, a pdf, a read-it-later view.
|
| Aside from that, you can also send the webpages to the
| Wayback Machine to take a snapshot.
|
| To archive pages behind a login or paywall, you can use the
| browser extension, which captures an image of the webpage in
| the browser and sends it to the server.
| dikdok wrote:
| > To archive pages behind a login or paywall, you can use
| the browser extension, which captures an image of the
| webpage in the browser and sends it to the server.
|
| Just an image? So no full text search?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > To archive pages behind a login or paywall, you can use
| the browser extension, which captures an image of the
| webpage in the browser and sends it to the server.
|
| It'd be awesome to integrate this with the SingleFile
| extension, which captures any webpage into a self-contained
| HTML file (with JS, CSS, etc, inlined).
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| We might add this, it's actually highly suggested by the
| users :)
| browningstreet wrote:
| Suggestion/request:
|
| What I'd really love is a super compact "short-name only" view
| of links. Just words, not lines or galleries. For super-high
| content views.
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| You can do that already:
|
| https://blog.linkwarden.app/releases/2.8#%EF%B8%8F-customiza.
| ..
| browningstreet wrote:
| Ahh, yes, you can reduce it to names with a lot of columns.
| In my personal ideal, I've love to store a short-name for a
| link and have no boxes. Personally, I've always wanted
| links to be like the tag cloud in pinboard and to have a
| page with multiple tags/categories.
|
| I'd also love a separation of human tags and AI tags (even
| by base or stem), just in case they provided radically
| different views, but both were useful.
|
| EDIT: Just did a quick look in the documentation, is there
| a native or supported distinction between links that are
| like bookmarks and links that are more
| content/articles/resources?
| colordrops wrote:
| Could still be a lot more compact. Would also like the
| hierarchical view in the main pane.
|
| In any case, nice project, thank you.
| colordrops wrote:
| Came here to ask for exactly this.
| zxcvgm wrote:
| Cool, looks like text highlighting is a new addition in 2.10.
| There aren't any examples in the demo site of this, but can it
| capture the highlighted text snippets and show them in the link
| details page? That would help me recall quickly why I saved the
| link, without opening the original link and re-reading the
| page. I haven't really seen this in other tools (or maybe I
| just haven't looked hard enough), except Memex.
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| > There aren't any examples in the demo site of this
|
| This is because we haven't updated the demo to the latest
| version.
|
| > but can it capture the highlighted text snippets and show
| them in the link details page?
|
| That's a good idea that we might implement later, but at the
| moment you can only highlight the links[1].
|
| [1]:
| https://blog.linkwarden.app/releases/2.10#%EF%B8%8F-text-
| hig...
| thm wrote:
| I have about ~30k .webarchive files -- is there a chance to
| import them?
| ryan29 wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on having a PWA vs
| regular mobile apps since it looks like you started with a PWA,
| but are moving to regular apps. Is that just a demand /
| eyeballs thing or were there technical reasons?
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| Mostly the UX it provides. PWAs are a quick and easy way to
| support mobile but the UX is nowhere near as good a
| traditional mobile app...
| achierius wrote:
| How difficult would it be to import an existing list of
| links/tags? Also, if I were using a hosted version, would I be
| able to eg insert/retrieve files via an API call?
|
| I ask because currently I use Readwise but have a local script
| that syncs the reader files to a local DB, which then feeds
| into some custom agent flows I have going on on the side.
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| > How difficult would it be to import an existing list of
| links/tags?
|
| Pretty easy if you have it in a bookmark html file format.
|
| > Also, if I were using a hosted version, would I be able to
| eg insert/retrieve files via an API call?
|
| Yup, check out the api documentation:
|
| https://docs.linkwarden.app/api/api-introduction
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Interesting project! A couple of questions:
|
| - Does the web front end support themes? It's a trivial thing
| but based on the screenshots, various things about the default
| theme bug me and it would be nice to be able to change those
| without a user style extension.
|
| - Does it have an API that would allow development of a native
| desktop front end?
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Started using it a while back. Works rather well, even though
| some minor UX quirks exist. Self-hosting is easy, too, with
| Docker Compose. If you're in the market for a web-accessible
| bookmark manager, maybe give it a go!
| nexle wrote:
| The pushing on their cloud offering almost everywhere (main page:
| https://linkwarden.app/, GitHub README:
| https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden, and installation guide:
| https://docs.linkwarden.app/self-hosting/installation) just give
| me a bad taste about it.
|
| I understood an open source project need revenue to survive, but
| the reason why this project grew so large is because of the self-
| hostable nature, and the push of the cloud offering is the
| opposite of that.
|
| I really hope this is not the first steps towards
| enshittification...
| ctxc wrote:
| Nah, I just see this as a sustainable way to keep the project
| alive :)
| ibaikov wrote:
| Recently started selfhosting it. I like it. I tried hoarder, but
| it was overcomplicated and consumed way more resources. Now it
| got MCP, so I might use it with n8n, we'll see.
|
| A couple improvements I'd like: I want drag-and-drop link saving.
|
| If I add a reddit link, it doesn't import the reddit thread
| title, it uses reddit's title in linkwarden (Reddit - the heart
| of the internet). Same goes for a few other websites like gitlab.
|
| I'd like an MCP.
|
| Resource usage optimization: while it is smaller than
| karakeep/hoarder, for me it consumes 500-950MB ram, and I have
| only 500 links added.
| gibibit wrote:
| Is there any software that can provide verified, trusted archives
| of websites?
|
| For example, we can go to the Wayback Machine at archive.org to
| not only see what a website looked like in the past, but prove it
| to someone (because we implicitly trust The Internet Archive).
| But the Wayback Machine has deleted sites when a site later
| changes its robots.txt to exclude it, meaning that old site
| REALLY disappears from the web forever.
|
| The difficulty for a trusted archive solution is in proving that
| the archived pages weren't altered, and that the timestamp of the
| capture was not altered.
|
| It seems like blockchain would be a big help, and would prevent
| back-dating future snapshots, but there seem to be a lot of
| missing pieces still.
|
| Thoughts?
| shrinks99 wrote:
| Webrecorder's WACZ signing spec
| (https://specs.webrecorder.net/wacz-auth/latest) does some of
| this -- authenticating the identity of who archived it and at
| what time -- but the rest of what you're asking for (legitimacy
| of the content itself) is an unsolved problem as web content
| isn't all signed by its issuing server.
|
| In some of the case studies Starling
| (https://www.starlinglab.org/) has published, they've published
| timestamps of authenticated WACZs to blockchains to prove that
| they were around at a specific time... More _layers_ of data
| integrity but not 100% trustless.
| gibibit wrote:
| Very informative, thanks!
| dj0k3r wrote:
| Take a look at singleFile - a project that lets you save the
| entire webpage. It has an integration for saving the hash if
| the page on a Blockchain. You can choose to set it up between
| parties who're interested in the provenance of the
| authenticity.
| sloped wrote:
| This looks nice, I like how many of these tools have been
| surfacing. I recently started using https://readeck.org/, which
| aims to solve some of the same problems and really like it. Much
| better than a "bookmark" tool for things like articles.
|
| My two favorite parts of Readeck are:
|
| - it provides a OPDS catalog of your saved content so you can
| very easily read things on your e-book reader of choice. I use
| KOReader on a Kindle and have really enjoyed reading my saved
| articles in the backyard after work.
|
| - you can generate a share link. I have used this to share some
| articles behind paywalls with friends and family where before I
| was copying and pasting content into an email.
| xwat wrote:
| The only issue stopping me from using Linkwarden is that it
| creates duplicates when importing bookmarks, see
| https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden/issues/442
| idkalexj wrote:
| An alt suggestion, I use Eagle (https://eagle.cool/) for this.
|
| I started using it primarily for images inspiration collecting
| but it has grown into my "everything" collecting, including
| bookmarks.
|
| Libraries can be shared via file sharing (e.g. google drive,
| dropbox), one time purchase price, amazing software design,
| extensions, and more.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Is it Mac only temporarily or do you think they'll stick with
| that?
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Eagle has a Windows version.
| raybb wrote:
| Just wish it had offline support. That's really the main use case
| for me is when I'm traveling and have spotty internet. Read
| articles offline and hopefully add some to the queue to be saved
| when I'm online again.
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| We're working on an official mobile app[1], which will most
| likely include this feature sometime after its launch :)
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden/issues/246#issuecom...
| csdvrx wrote:
| Will the offline mode work on laptops?
| raybb wrote:
| An official app with that sounds great! From what you know,
| would it be possible to also have offline support with the
| PWA?
| evanjrowley wrote:
| I've been using Karakeep (formerly known as Hoarder) and it's
| been a great experience so far. One thing they're working on now
| is a Safari browser extension. I noticed Linkwarden lacks a
| Safari browser extension - is one on the roadmap?
|
| Lately I've been using MacOS and I've noticed Chromium-based
| browsers use more resources than the native Safari. This is
| especially true with Microsoft Edge, which sometimes consumes
| tens of gigabytes of RAM (possibly a memory leak?). In an attempt
| to preserve battery life and SSD longevity, Safari is now my go-
| to browser on MacOS.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I'm also using Karakeep. It also has LLM-powered tagging,
| which, in my experience, works excellently. It's easy to self-
| host, fast on a relatively underpowered NAS, and I love the UX.
| Highly recommended.
|
| Linkwarden looks nice, too, but when picking an option, I
| wanted one with a native Android app.
| piyuv wrote:
| I chose linkwarden after seeing hoarder's native iOS app
| manmal wrote:
| I'm a heavy user and really happy with the speed and stability
| I'm getting, running Linkwarden on my Hetner VPS. Only problem
| was in the beginning, importing a lot of existing links from
| Pinboard, the available RAM of my meager VPS was exceeded
| multiple times by metadata resolution. But once that's been
| overcome, it's a zero effort tool.
| aiono wrote:
| Looks really neat. But it also seems a bit heavyweight (for the
| client). Is it the case compared to https://readeck.org/en/ ?
| salynchnew wrote:
| Very cool project!
|
| QQ for users: How is the UX compared with ArchiveBox?
| dennisy wrote:
| I love these sorts of apps, but I still am not really sure why I
| need the webpages. At any time I do research for a topic I find
| more things than I can read in that session, so what are the old
| links for?
|
| I would love to hear how people use this product once they have
| stored the links!
| Lammy wrote:
| I haven't tried Linkwarden (still doing the `wget --mirror`
| thing myself), but one of the reasons I like archiving pages is
| so I can have a collection of pages that work in older browsers
| on vintage computers. I pop open View Source on any site I find
| that looks even vaguely old, and if I see a DOCTYPE up to and
| including XHTML 1.1 I archive that shit _immediately_ even if
| it 's not a site about any of my biggest interests lol
| ryan29 wrote:
| I've used https://historio.us since 2011 and still pay for it
| to keep access to all the pages I've archived over the years.
| The price has been kept low enough that I can't bring myself to
| cancel it even though I've been using self-hosted
| https://archivebox.io/ for the last few years.
|
| I always include an archived link whenever I reference
| something in documentation. That's my main use at the moment.
|
| However, I also feel like I've gotten a lot of really good
| value when trying to learn a new development topic. Whenever I
| find something that looks like it _might_ be useful, I archive
| it and, because everything is searchable, I end up with a
| searchable index of really high quality content once I actually
| know what I 'm doing.
|
| I find it hard to rediscover content via web search these days
| and there's so much churn that having a personal archive of
| useful content is going to increase in value, at least in my
| opinion.
| spyder wrote:
| There is also KaraKeep:
|
| https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
|
| Seems very similar.
| ijustwanttovote wrote:
| I'm paying for readwise, any benefits of switching over to this?
| borg16 wrote:
| it's a third of the price to begin with. I think readwise has a
| winner in reader app, but they sure do charge a premium for the
| same. You can get the same functionality in linkwarden or
| pinboard for a fraction of readwise's subscription pricing.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Is there a way to import pinboard or similar data?
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(page generated 2025-05-01 23:00 UTC)