I am looking for a self hosted bookmark manager. Does anyone have any experience to share?
Ideally I’d like:
- Self hosted with FOSS license
- Firefox integration (ideally on android, too)
- ideally no AI features or at least opt-in
- ideally human driven development (as little AI code as possible)
Linkwarden, Karakeep, Nextcloud/bookmarks seems to be the main ones.
I really like Hoarder but their new interface update is trash. It looks fine on the phone though.
I use Nextcloud’s bookmarks plugin and sync it to librewolf with floccus. On graphene I install the Nextcloud bookmarks app since floccus isn’t available for ironfox
Floccus is its own standalone app on Android.
It never worked well for me (syncing issues constantly), which is why I do not use it on graphene
A lot of issues in the Android/iOS app have been fixed recently, you may want to give it another try :)
I use linkwarden. Pretty easy to setup with docker and run behind a reverse proxy (you could probably do tailscale if that’s your thing). I have it setup with a few RSS feeds to download blog updates and it seems to work well. I didn’t configure it to use a local LLM so I have to manually organize my bookmarks. Usually I do that in bulk once every few weeks. I’m happy with it.
Tried them all, settled on Linkding too. The UI is simple and clean.
Not recommended as it will be a constant maintenance and upgrade cycle to keep it working with Firefox but you can actually setup your own Firefox server stack (not just sync, but profiles and account everything):
https://github.com/jackyzy823/fxa-selfhostingI’ve heard a lot of good regarding linkwarden.
I tried Floccus and Linkwarden. Floccus was better way of handling bookmarks but it was not reliable between my 4 browsers. Linkwarden is something different than what I was used to but I like it, I like lots of space for descriptons and i like how it can preserve content with e.g. screenshot.
I recently went on the same journey and decided on Floccus on WebDAV. All I wanted was a straightforward way to share my bookmarks across devices, not be locked into anything, and not have a ton of features I’d never use. Since I already had WebDAV set up, it was just a matter of installing clients.
Check shiori out. It’s very minimal in terms of features, but it’s a project that seems to not use LLMs at all. It has a Firefox extension and recently someone made a vibecoded android app.
Slop features are opt-in
Shit, looks like they went all in on vibeslopping, time to look for something new
Floccus seems slop as well Readeck and shiori look good at first glance
Firefox natively syncs bookmarks if you’re not aware, including to mobile.
Cool, how do we selfhost that?
Is it possible to hook this up to FF mobile as well?
You will need to setup a reverse proxy that handles ssl and letsencrypt in front of the syncstorage-rs docker and make sure you don’t bind to http://localhost/ but https://example.com/.
Firefox clients refuse to connect to a sync storage that doesn’t use a signed certificate unless it is on localhost.To use it on firefox mobile you will need to activate the developer mode by going to Settings -> About Firefox and press the logo multiple times (I think five?). Exit the settings menu and enter it again. Now you will see Sync Debug at the top of the settings menu and in that menu you can setup custom servers.
Amazing! TYSM for the detailed instructions! I’ve got a reverse proxy and a domain in place, so this should be no problem.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard people do that, but I don’t know because I don’t actually use sync.
Alright. Sounds like I’ve got a winter project now. Thanks!
I just migrated linkwarden to karakeep, because with linkwarden I couldn’t make it archive certain bot protected websites.
I use linkwarden with singlefile for that problem and it works great. In case anyone else has the same concern.
I know it works, but it doesn’t make sense to me why I need to constantly disable jshelter for cloudflare bs and let my local device browser do the extra work, if my server can have it’s own browser to do it.
So I’ve set up karakeep with a browser that passes through most (if not all) bot protections and my on device browser can stay a bit more private with less annoyance.
