12mo ago

Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages

Greetings everyone! Daniel here, I've been working on Linkwarden part-time over the past few months.

Linkwarden is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages.

Key features:

📸 Preserve webpages as Screenshot, PDF, etc. So you can access them even if they are taken down.
👥 Collaborative, so you can share your collections with your friends and colleagues. You can also make them public and share them with the world.
📱 Designed for every screen size, from widescreen monitors down to smartphones.
⚡️ Open source and fully self-hostable!
✨ And so many more features! (Literally, just didn't want to make this post too long. Check out the Github repo and Website for more info...)

If you like what we're doing, you can support the project by either starring ⭐️ the repo to make it more visible to others or by subscribing to the Cloud plan (which helps the project, a lot).

Things like mobile app (PWA) are already on the project roadmap and I'm so excited to share them with you in the future.

Feedback is always welcome, so feel free to share your thoughts!

Website: https://linkwarden.app

GitHub: https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden

112 comments

Cool app at first glance!
I always wonder why some open source projects choose discord and not matrix?
- Matrix is cool but its user base is not there yet.
  
  Then stop driving people to discord alone, at least use both so there’s an option
  
  By that logic, why are you on lemmy?
- Discord and matrix are not searchable, they shouldn't be used at all
  
  That's a client issue, not a protocol issue
- I wonder why they don't just set up a forum
  
  Perhaps they could create a community on programming.dev
- I think Matrix suffers from some issues with large communities, for instance Graphene OS has already had to abandon 2-3 of their main group chats due to same bug and last time I checked (2-3 months ago) there has even been talks of switching to Discord. That is, just in case, a community of some of the most diehard privacy nerds btw
- Even cooler page to sell you on the app. Very smooth gifs
  
  Gifs are the USP

Is there the potential for SingleFile html archives rather than pdf & screenshots? I’d imagine it’d be a fair bit smaller file.
- Or other standard archiving formats like WARC.
  There also is https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox which looks a bit similar.

Thank you for including oAuth options for sign on. Makes a big difference being able to use the same account for all the things like freshRSS, seafile, immich etc.
- I'm intrigued. How does it work? Do you have a link or an article to point me to?
  
  The general principle is called single sign on (sso).
  The idea is that instead of each all keeping track of users itself, there is another app (sometimes called an identity provider) that does this. Then when you try to log into an app, it takes to the to login of your identity provider instead. When the IP says you are the correct user, it sends a token to the app saying to let you access your account.
  The huge benefits are if you are already logged into the IP on a browser for example, the other apps will login automatically without having to put in your password again.
  Also for me the biggest benefit is not having to manage passwords for a large number of apps so family that uses my server have 1 account which gives them access to jellyfin, seafile, immich, freshrss etc. If they change that password it changes it for everything. You can enforce minimum password requirements. You can also add 2FA to any app now immediately.
  I use Authentik as my identity provider: https://goauthentik.io/https://goauthentik.io/
  There's good guides to settings it up with traefik so that you get let encrypt certificates and can use traefik for proxy authentication on web based apps like sonarr. There are many different authentication methods an app can choose to use and Authentik essentially supports everything.
  https://youtu.be/CPURnYaW3Zk
  SSO should really be the standard for self hosted apps because this way they don't have to worry about ensuring they have the latest security for user management etc. The app just allows a dedicated identity provider to worry about user management security so the app devs can focus on just the app.
- Although in the subscription version, SSO is not available unless you purchase the “Contact Us” version. https://sso.tax would like a word.
  
  Free for self hosted which is probably what matters to most here

Using it since 2 months now and I really like it. Was totally worth a donation👍
- Thanks!

I’ve been using ArchiveBox, this looks a bit more feature-full than ArchiveBox although it seems like ArchiveBox has been pretty stable. Anyone have experience with both, can vouch for the pros and cons?
I may take some time to compare the two. After taking another look at Linkwarden I get the impression it may handle archiving pages differently than ArchiveBox, which isn’t a bad thing it may just not fit the usage of everyone who uses ArchiveBox. The presentation and UI look really good, which is something I find ArchiveBox suffers a bit from.

I actually tried to build Raindrop.io-clone like this one one day, but never got the time to work fully on it... Congrats OP!

Archivebox is in my obsidian workflow, it grabs every link in my vault and archives it. I didn't see an API in linkwarden, perhaps I missed it.
- Do you have any particular way of organizing the links themselves? I've moved to hosting all my bookmarks in Obsidian as well and am curious as to how others go about it
  
  I treat links like atomic notes. I add as much detail as I feel like to each link, sometimes I go back and add tags and notes. Then I have an exceptionally poor process that attempts to go back to each link, get the archivebox archive and uses python to attempt to grab the article text (I tried using newspaper3k at first, but it’s unmaintained, so moved to readability). Then sticks the resulting link text into the note.
  Honestly It’s a mess, and I really haven’t figured out how to do link things together very well, but, for now, it’s my little disaster of a solution.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters

IP Internet Protocol
NAS Network-Attached Storage
SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SSO Single Sign-On
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #412 for this sub, first seen 8th Jan 2024, 22:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
- Pretty sure the IP detected was a user talking about ‘identity provider(s)’ and not Internet Protocol.

Fewer Letters	More Letters
IP	Internet Protocol
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
SSO	Single Sign-On

What value can this bring me over features available using a Mozilla (Firefox) account and the Official Wayback Machine Browser Extension?
- Collaboration, making your collections public, better organization, self-hostedness (idk if that's a word), better UI and so on...
  
  Thank you for responding quickly

It seems so much nicer than my nextcloud bookmarks!

How does making collections public work if you're self hosting?
- Like this: https://cloud.linkwarden.app/public/collections/118

FYI, if you have a synology NAS and want to self-host using the docker install, these instructions work: https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-linkwarden-on-your-synology-nas/

This looks like a good replacement for Raindrop.io

Amazing! Have wanted something like this for years, currently use raindrop but not fully, very hesitant of locking myself in. This looks very promising.
- I'm very curious... Why do you feel locked in by raindrop? I like that it can regularly upload exports to my Google drive and I can Always download them as html and csv.
  
  That sounds great, I didn’t look into it enough to know that

I can imagine that news orgs won't like having publicly available backups of their subscriber only content. Is this a problem that has been considered?
Also, somewhat related, are the plans to turn this a little bit into a P2P archive.org? I mean, if multiple people store snapshots of webpages at different times, the timeline could be rebuilt using their publicly available snapshots.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- are the plans to turn this a little bit into a P2P archive.org?
  Now that would be cool!
- Yeah. I expect basically any publicly available instances to get C&Ds REAL fast.
  And a p2p archive.org will basically never work. For the same reasons that the various NSFW lemmy instances get defederated from almost instantly. Because there is room for discussion on sites that highlight nudity in movies. There isn't much room to discuss when it is nothing but revenge porn, "fappening links", ripped OF content, and (inevitably) child porn.
  Stuff like this... I am sure there are niches but I am not seeing a lot of benefit over either a folder or a notes app that lets me upload PDFs (or even just google drive). But once you try to build a "community" you are going to have the same moderation issues amplified a hundred fold.
  
  I'm not sure I understand your thoughts on p2p archive.org . What does it have to do with NSFW lemmy? I don't follow.
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Installed and no way to login, see this in your GH issues:
https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden/issues/415
This is a fresh install as about 10 minutes ago so using the :latest tag which I believe is the v 2.4.8 build. Signing up is possible and I was able to create my user account so that's a good start at least. :)

Thats neat. I was searching for something like this. Goes on my list.

I wish it was database agnostic. And I'm slightly concerned about the version three rewrite.
It does look awesome, and I'll revisit it to see where things are in six months.

looks very nice, thanks. would appreciate better documenting of SMTP options (login & password) and support for Authelia.

So is this like a self-hosted equivalent to pinboard.in? Can I import all my existing Pinboard bookmarks including their tags?

Thanks for your work. I look forward to installing this soon!
Do you have any plans to support importing from similar services such as Raindrop, Omnivore, or Shiori?

Has anyone been able to get the Firefox extension to work with a self-hosted installation? It's not accepting my login address.
- Works without issues here. Keep in mind to add http(s):// in front of your address.
  
  Yeah, I'm doing that and it isn't working on ff for windows or android.
  I can log into the same address on my browser no problem.

My question is: what's wrong with browser bookmarks and something SIMPLE to sync them between like devices like floccus (+ webdav server)?
- Content changes or disappear.
  For fun, I booted up a old 2005 laptop with windows xp on it. The bookmarks were all dead. And most weren't archived in any way.
  There's were many browser games I used to play that is completely lost in time.
  
  How would browser games survive with that solution tho? They most likely require some server...
- no image/text previews, only small part of the title visible, no sharing, no automatic archiving

This sounds very cool and I'd definitely use it.

I would love sth like this with nextcloud integration.

Any demo? That doesnt have a paywall?

Very intriguing, will definitely check out! Nice work :)

Is it possible for you to make it mobile friendly? How does it compare with raindrop?

Something like Wallabag, but modern and not only for article content? 😁
Honestly it looks cool. Also I so much love to see an open source app with fully managed straightforward paid hosting option! Myself I am going to self-host it anyway as I have time to learn and manage my servers, but it is great when trying to recommend app for others or have an option if I get lazy.

Can't find the info in the repository. Can I share a collection or specific links via RSS? I built my own application to archive URLs and grab the text content, and I also build a RSS feed from that. Can Linkwarden do something similar?

Cool stuff, but I don't see a reason to ditch raindrop.io
- Raindrop doesn't seem to be self-hosted? This is the selfhosted community...
  
  My bad.

112 comments