What’s your method for archiving bookmarked/liked social media posts?

I have a very elaborate system🙃. If they are Reddit posts (back when I used Reddit), I used Apollo’s save feature and then forgot they existed. If they are tildes posts, I use the bookmark feature and forget they exist. If it’s a website I save it as a bookmark in whatever browser I am using at the time and forget it exists.

For the most part I don't. It's extremely rare that social media content will hold it's value over a few years time. Bookmarks are typically short-term for me to look at something when I have more time, and the stuff I have still bookmarked are full of bizzare and outdated things; the remaining utility is almost entirely nostalgia.

That being said, there's a really easy way to archive almost every webpage as long as it's not dynamic: ctrl-s in just about every browser will let you save the webpage along with it's images. last time I checked both Firefox and Chrome have built-in screenshot utilities that will capture the entirety of the page. Unfortunately neither is a universally good option because of the way that some websites are designed.

I use Raindrop. It's not free but it's a polished, nicely built cross platform app also available on the web. I used to use Pinboard and I loved it but its developer has clearly given up on it and I didn't want to rely on it anymore, given the nature of the service.

I have not looked into this yet, but in the future I could look into self-hosted solutions. I am happy with Raindrop, but I use it not to retrieve stuff but to store it and I store it, quite frankly, for peace of mind. It's far and few in between the times I actually log into it to dig something up. It's basically a service I pay for because of some psychological need, instead of a practical one. If you fall into the latter category, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I don't know if anyone collects online recipes the way I do, but Paprika Recipe Manager does a brilliant job of extracting recipe content from webpages and saving it in usable, organized format. The data can be exported as plain HTML files, so you're not locked in if the vendor goes out of business.

I've tried scraping sites/pages to save content as /u/Akir mentioned, but I can't think of the last time I tried to find something I cared about that wasn't accessible via archive.org.

I'm playing around with Capacities as a combination mind-mapper and archive, but I'm not sure this solves either use case definitively.

If it's something that I feel is (my abstract notion of) knowledge then I save it here: knowledge.list. Usually things only go there if I think about it more than once or if I've referenced it before in conversation

If it's something I want to tinker with in the future then I save it here: todo_tools

I have the same repo on my phone too so I can add stuff (via Termux), even offline and sync it later but usually I just use SSH. I have the same fish function on both too:

function knowledge
    for l in $argv
        echo $l | sed 's|\.m\.|.|' >>~/j/lists/knowledge.list
    end
    sorted ~/j/lists/knowledge.list
end

function sorted
    if isatty stdin
        sort --unique --stable --ignore-case $argv | sponge $argv
    else
        cat - | string trim | sort --unique --stable --ignore-case
    end
end

Beyond those two categories I haven't felt a need to store lists of things aside from normal data hoarding activities.

It has been pretty useful to save my internet comments so that I can search them and reference them later:

~/j/social/
library tildes ~/d/library/datasets/social/tildes.db xk3 --cookies ~/.local/cookies-tildes-net.txt
for title in (sqlite --no-headers --raw-lines ~/d/library/datasets/social/tildes.db 'select path from media' | sed 's|.*\(/\)||' | strip)
    sqlite --no-headers --raw-lines ~/d/library/datasets/social/tildes.db "select text from media where path like '%$title'" >$title.html
end

~/d/library/datasets/social/
reddit-user-to-sqlite user BuonaparteII

~/j/social/
for title in (sqlite --no-headers --raw-lines ~/d/library/datasets/social/reddit.db 'select permalink from comments' | sed 's|.*\/comments\/[^\/]*\/\(.*\)/.*|\1|' | tr / '#')
    set comment_id (string split '#' -f2 $title)
    sqlite --no-headers --raw-lines ~/d/library/datasets/social/reddit.db "select text from comments where permalink like '%$comment_id%'" >$title.md
end
for title in (sqlite --no-headers --raw-lines ~/d/library/datasets/social/reddit.db 'select permalink from posts' | sed 's|.*\/comments\/[^\/]*\/\(.*\)/.*|\1|')
    sqlite --no-headers --raw-lines ~/d/library/datasets/social/reddit.db "select text from posts where permalink like '%$title%' order by timestamp desc limit 1" >$title.md
end
lb mergedbs --pk id ~/d/library/datasets/social/BuonaparteII.db ~/d/library/datasets/social/reddit.db

I save both the link and contents in my note taking app, which currently is Anytype (it’s like Notion, but privacy focused). I used to have the same problem as you, it happened more than once having a link saved, only to then being deleted.

Usually the web clipper works, but when it doesn’t, I copy paste manually the text when I get to my PC. I used to have a shortcut in my iphone that did this automatically for Apple Notes, but unfortunately they still haven’t implemented shortcut functions for Anytype

In there, I separate each link with tags, one for when I want to check the link soon, another when I know I might need it someday but right now I can’t be bothered

Not only specific to social media posts, I have somewhat standardized my approach to archiving any web or social media content that i wish to preserve in one of a few ways:

• if its text only, and i don't care about formatting, i likely might copy/paste into a text file on my local machine and save it in some folder such as "inspirational" or "references", etc. I include the original url as well as maybe a little summary or context of my own to help my future self remember why i saved it, etc.
• if its text but i need to preserve somewhat the look and feel or some aspect of formatting at least a little bit, or maybe some images in the post are essential, then i toggle the "reader view" option in my browser (if the site supports it, which is odd that a very few do not)...and then "print to pdf", and save the pdf to local folder somewhere. Why the reader view instead of printing the original view of a web page? Because webpages nowadays often are built with so much crap or at least so many ads displace the content in weird ways when viewed in "print view". (This happens way more with commercial or social media sites, and less with the single person humble blog site of course.) So, the reader view really does a nice joib of "cleaning up/away" alot of the cruft but keeping the meat of the content of a webpage/post...most of the time.
• Finally, if the preservation needs to be as identical as possible to the original, then i resort to screenshots. In some very rare cases, i take the screenshot, and also create an "companion" local text file containing the originl/source url and a little summary about the topic of the screenshot to aid in local search/grep.

By the way, i still on occasion bookmark urls using my browsers bookmark feature...but i assume most things will eventually break because things just die on the web (sadly)...so there's an expectation of urls being ephemeral. Bookmarks are more like a temporary holding place for me; like a todo of web stuff to maybe watch in the near-future (or not).

Also, do i like saving things in pdfs? Hellz no! But, over the years i've tried other options (full web page, web page with only html per browser save, Word docs, etc.), but none seem to be consistent enough nor easy/quick enough like printing/saving to pdfs...and, wow, do i dislike pdfs on several principles. But, hey, they seem to mostly do the job.

There are many other options to archive web content, such as, but not limited to Singlefile (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile), ArchiveBox (https://archivebox.io/), WARC (https://archive-it.org/post/the-stack-warc-file/), etc....But i have been too lazy to explore.

There were tools for that on reddit at least. It let me export all my favorites into a list of links. From there I put them on some cloud for a 2nd point of backup .

I don't really otherwise have a universal backup system. have a total of 10 bookmarks on Tildes and 20 favorites on Hackernews, so not at a scale where I'd seek a tool. You can always use browser bookmarks and then export those when needed. All major browsers have a built-in way to export them to HTML.

This just came out and has been very nice in the limited time I've spent with it so far: https://www.plinky.app

I use linkading and wallabag and Joplin. For social media I just save within it.

I use Pinboard and I wrote a python script that I run every now and then that deletes dead sites:

https://github.com/ehamiter/pindead

I made an attempt at my own bookmarking service but I lost steam on it.

https://imgur.com/a/8ErkWrZ

I use Bibsonomy, "the blue social bookmark and publication sharing system."

Using BibSonomy you can easily create collections of bookmark and publication posts. Just insert bookmarks and publications. You can do this even faster with our BibSonomy browser add-ons or bookmarklets.

In addition, you can also use ISBN, ISSN, DOI, or barcodes to have the insert publication form filled up automatically for you. Use tags to organize the posts in your collection. If you choose them carefully, tags are a very powerful instrument.

A new beta just came to my attention, sublime.app. Web and IOS only for now.

It's not free for practical purposes, looks like a lighter weight Evernote, and there's no information about data portability. But if you want a usable Internet scrapbook where you can save the interesting bits independent of whether a site stays live, this might be it. File size limit of 4 MB (for the free version, at least).

There's a social aspect where you can share or follow other's collections, like Pinboard.

I've dropped my test account because it's too pricy and buggy in Android browsers, but it may develop into something interesting.