It's a fairly universal fact that there are never quite enough hours in the day to accomplish everything we want to do. That's why we have productivity systems to keep interesting information for later reading, or Kanban boards to shuffle priorities around on, and other handy tools.

One of our most frequently used tools was Pocket, a digital scrapbook of sorts for storing website bookmarks and curating new, interesting pages through the discovery feed. It has worked well for millions, but has never been quite the same since Mozilla picked it up in 2017, and now the repository is being sewn shut.

That's the problem with getting reliant on any tool that a third party maintains. Eventually, it might go away. Instead, move your bookmark collection to a self-hosted alternative, and you'll never have to worry about the service disappearing or paying a subscription fee. Some of these tools even save a snapshot of the content on the bookmarked page, so you won't lose access to vital data if link rot happens. Plus, you'll get to learn some new skills in the process.

5 Shiori

My personal favorite because it saves me the content and the URL

I realized I didn't just have bookmarks in Pocket. Lots of them, if anyone wanted to know. I had bookmarks everywhere, from every browser I've ever used, every mobile device I've ever touched, and a few other notebook apps that I tried to use to organize my jumbled brain. That really didn't work out so well, as the jumble was spread out among multiple services, but with Pocket going away, I had an expiry date to work towards.

I hadn't done much about it, though, until I found Shiori earlier this year. This wonderful app not only saves my bookmarks for me, on my NAS, where it's not subject to the whims of corporations or VC funding. It creates an archival copy (and/or ebook) of the contents of the bookmarked link, which safeguards me against link rot, ensuring that those bookmarks contain valuable data and won't turn into a 404 page when I click on them five years later.

Oh, and the best part? A built-in command line tool to import my Pocket links, so that I don't have to do it manually.

4 Karakeep

AI to automagically assign tags when you save things, because you know you won't

We could all be a little more organized, but I'm the first person to acknowledge that it's a lot more effort than I often have energy for. My bookmark folders are long streams of consciousness, curated in date order, spanning years and years. So the idea behind Karakeep immediately appeals, and it should to you, too. It uses AI (yes, but please keep reading) to add tags to your bookmarks, and over time, you'll be able to use those tags as a memory aid to find the article you saved five years ago.

It's more powerful than a simple bookmark organizer, but you can make it even more so by using folders per device you save bookmarks from, because sometimes that added data point helps your memory. You can save images, quick notes, and even e-commerce wishlists, and it all gets sorted like magic, like that hat in Harry Potter. Oh, and it has something many self-hosted services don't: mobile apps for iOS and Android, so you can access your bookmark hoard easily.

3 LinkStash

I like anything that uses 'stash' in the name, really

Having an unclutteredand intuitive interface is a big plus for me, and LinkStash meets that requirement nicely. Add the URL, let the app do its thing, add some custom tags when prompted if you want. The last thing you want when you're trying to save a bookmark for later is for it to take time, and this service doesn't wait around.

It also provides offline access, as it archives the vital content from the link, and there is no tracking, as it resides on your NAS. Unless you want to add telemetry to track yourself, I guess, because a home lab is also about experimentation. It may not feature some of the visual flourishes of other apps on this list, but sometimes simplicity is indeed beautiful.

2 Hoarder

If the name fits...

Hoarder is another advanced bookmarking solution, with built-in tagging, archiving, and organizing abilities. You can drag and drop links into the interface almost anywhere, making it trivial to add more content, and the same trick works for adding additional data to links or tags you've already saved. While most of these tools save a reader view with the text of the site, Hoarder also drags the images and titles in, plus takes full-page screenshots, so you have a Recall-like storage solution, without the privacy implications.

You can tag in a local LLM or OpenAI to generate tags for your links, and there are nested smart lists to help with the clutter. Like the smart categories on your Steam Library, they'll move links automatically to the correct categories so you spend less time organizing. Oh, and it can archive YouTube videos, if you have the space. With RSS support and OCR, it gives you more options to hoard data and to search even inside images for the information you crave.

Hoarder also has iOS and Android apps and browser extensions for easier use, and with a reverse proxy or Tailscale, you can get access to it from outside your home network, so you can access your datahoard anywhere.

1 LinkAce

Get notifications if a link goes offline

LinkAce might be a little less gilded than the other options here, but it has one thing that makes it stand apart. It'll check links and alert you if any go offline. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is for archival purposes, but this means you can use it to check the uptime of your other self-hosted apps, as long as they have a public-facing URL. That's a neat trick on its own, and with robust tagging functions and the ability to save websites as bookmarklets using JavaScript, you've got a pretty decent system.

Pocket is being sewn up, but self-hosting your bookmark collection is a better option

Pocket had a good run, but that's the problem with relying on third-party hosting for saving your information. Pocket even had a subscription model, but Mozilla decided it was too much development work over the core apps it maintains, and that's the end of it. Self-hosting your bookmarks is always going to be the better option, as you have full control over the data, and all is left to figure out is a good 3-2-1 backup strategy so that your app doesn't bite the dust either.