Postmarks

★★★★☆

Postmarks is a public bookmarks/linkblogging server, kind of like Delicious or Pinboard, but built as a self-hosted server that can interact with others over ActivityPub. This means you can make a linkblog that people can follow on Mastodon, like this one, @interesting@bookmarks.kvibber.com, which I occasionally boost on my main Fediverse account. Unlike most Fediverse software, it’s built for a single person (or at least a single account).

Overall I like it: It has a decent search, each entry has room for a description/quote and tags, and there are Atom feeds for the full timeline, tags, and tag combinations. There’s also a bookmarklet that can be used to send it your open tab.

It does take a little effort to get it to run smoothly unless you’re using Glitch. I’m using the following script to auto-restart it when it crashes.

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
	npm run start
	echo "Program crashed"
	date
	sleep 1
done

The biggest drawback is that it hasn’t been updated much since the initial release. A patch to fix compatibility with non-Mastodon servers went in recently, so I can use it with GoToSocial and Snac now, and you can even follow on Bluesky through Bridgy Fed! But there are other problems that remain unaddressed, like new and pending comments not being easily visible, or edits not federating to other servers.

One of these days I’m going to hack together something to auto-publish starred items from Wallabag. For now I’ve got it going the other way: I can tag an item ToRead in Postmarks, and Wallabag will pick it up from the feed at /tagged/toread.xml.

Another someday goal: wrap it in a PWA so I can send links to it from other apps on my phone. The bookmarklet works on mobile Chromium browsers, but not on mobile Firefox (probably the fact that it’s trying to open in a new tab), and of course not in other apps.