Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.

Isn’t Pinboard (Who bought delicious) very similar? I also see bookmarks of my friend there, recently switched to Raindrop though as it’s much more maintained.

it is but people are switching away due to lack of maintenance and the founders political views

Self hosted Linkding is a pretty great modern equivalent https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

I was always confused my del.icio.us, and bookmark sharing in general. In my head bookmarks are sharing are distinct things. Bookmarks are things I want to save to visit again or a shortcut to easily visit often. Sharing is something I think someone else might find interesting, and thinks others will too, but I probably won't ever visit again.

I will bookmark the site to pay my utility bill, but it's not something I'd ever share. I might share a link to funny YouTube video, but wouldn't bookmark it.

I think social bookmarking didn't really know what it was, which is why the modern versions are more about sharing links than bookmarking. I don't post my bookmarks to Reddit, where people follow me as a person. I would post links I think are worth sharing to a topic people are interested in following.

There's also Readeck, which is a similar self-hosted tool that also captures some text content it can discover (i.e. article text and images, video transcripts, highlighted sections) and can export collections to RSS feeds and epub.