from Hacker News

Betula – federated bookmarking software for the independent web

by guilherme-puida on 6/9/24, 5:07 AM with 64 comments

  • by renegat0x0 on 6/9/24, 7:48 PM

  • by kseistrup on 6/9/24, 9:31 AM

    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.
  • by haunter on 6/9/24, 3:10 PM

    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.
  • by FireInsight on 6/9/24, 8:18 PM

    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.

  • by purple-leafy on 6/9/24, 10:00 AM

    Looks great, there doesn’t appear to be an associated browser extension. What are the thoughts on a browser extension alternative of this?
  • by andrei-akopian on 6/9/24, 3:41 PM

    What's wrong with browser bookmarks?
  • by ikesau on 6/9/24, 1:16 PM

    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.
  • by JackFr on 6/9/24, 12:12 PM

    Misread it as “federated bookmaking software for the independent web” and thought “Yes, a useful application of blockchain!”
  • by bobajeff on 6/9/24, 2:23 PM

    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.
  • by hammyhavoc on 6/11/24, 1:03 AM

    I like it, but not sure what I think about creating an additional fediverse presence. Consolidating makes more sense than adding more feeds, IMO.
  • by SpaceGlow on 6/9/24, 12:45 PM

    Any etymology other than "female virgin" in hebrew?
  • by 1317 on 6/9/24, 12:12 PM

    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

  • by solatic on 6/9/24, 6:10 PM

    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...

  • by mofosyne on 6/9/24, 10:31 AM

    It be nice if there is a way to sync this with mastodon
  • by mesbahamin on 6/9/24, 4:25 PM

    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!