Bookmark management for non-technical people?
TLDR; I'm looking for a free way to improve bookmark management without increasing cognitive load.
I find that with the constant stream of information online, paired with my ADHD, I tend to know nothing in detail. So I bookmark so that I can return to the same articles regularly instead so that I can 1) stay informed with more depth rather than breadth and 2) contribute to online discourse when I see a gap.
I'm using bookmark folders (by topic) for articles I want to refer back to regularly, and the built in "reading list" for things I do want to come back to but don't plan to keep a record of.
But my bookmarks are overflowing because of all the other stuff I have folders for (admin logins, shopping, local services, social sites, online office stuff, literature and languages, fun stuff, etc).
I also bookmark folders for these:
- Politics (local/national)
- Environment
- Human rights issue #1
- Human rights issue (n) ...
These basically have 1) compelling facts in support of the issue or 2) important memorable counter statements to common misinformation.
But I get easily lost among clutter, and I contend with brain fog. I've seen stuff about "second brain" online, but to be honest they're way too complicated for me (raindrop.io synced with this and that...). Is the folder system I'm using as good as it gets for people like me who need to avoid complexity?
I'm currently on macOS & iOS but plan to return to linux when I next upgrade in a few years.
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 bookmark, 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:
But they don't have the layout that start.me has. Thanks again for the detailed comment, I'm signing up now!
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.
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.
The Kagi Orion browser is safari-based, but allows both chrome and Firefox extensions.