The design of Pinboard exists in a similar but self hosted service called linkding [1]. I've been self hosting with Docker for a few years with no issues I can recall. Just checked and it does have the responsive forms as well.
Thank you! Linkding has everything I wanted from Pinboard (a bit nicer interface :)). I just set it up, imported everything from Pinboard, and will probably be happy.
Pinboard: Settings -> Backup -> "HTML (legacy Netscape format almost everyone can read)"
Linkding: Settings -> General -> Import "Import bookmarks and tags in the Netscape HTML format. This will execute a sync where new bookmarks are added and existing ones are updated."
The stuff in quotes is verbatim from the admin panels, I have not tried it.
Yes, if you count the export from Pinboard to Bookmark.html and then import to Linkding for once.
One weird thing though is, that Linkding does not have marking a bookmark "read" on first click: This is the most useful feature on Pinboard for me.
Via the pinboard-bookmarklet I pile all the links I come across, then mass read them and can track what's been read because the first click marks them on Pinboard.
> Reason: I had started paying yearly for the archive option and it stopped working and I tried and failed several times to get in contact with support.
Same. Archival stopped working, got a bunch of very confrontative replies from the admin and felt it wasn't worth my time to argue with him.
By the way, didn't notice that raindrop.io started offering a permanent library. That's great. I wish ReadKit supported it too. (Pocket permanent library had the very same issue a long time ago, I stopped using it for this reason).
Is there any tool to migrate from pinboard to raindrop while keeping all the tags and permanent pages stored at the time it was saved?
It's a shame there isn't more of an open community around pinboard. Some time ago, I tried to get an answer about a very basic API detail (the format of a token, IIRC) and couldn't get it. I love the site itself, but I've been motivated to move off to my own local system for a while—and I'm slowly doing just that!
Good point but for me, ultimately it wouldn't help.
There is something that stopped working on the server side that only the dev (devs?) can fix and my requests kept getting ignored despite the fact that I was a paying customer (both lifetime and later recurring on top).
I’m a huge fan of Pinboard owner’s talk on website obesity [1], and I like the brutal minimalistic look, so I’ve wanted to try it out for a while now. I am having second thoughts now: no responsive styles, even for the one feature your users are likely to be using on the go, is pretty frustrating at least.
I would also like there to be an official mobile app for saving links, and browser extensions that actually work and reliably save the pages. I like Maciej, but not adding these in the past like 7 years feels more lazy than minimalistic to me :/.
The Chrome extension was last updated a month ago. The whole site went quietly responsive over the last two years. I beg people to align their criticism with reality.
I plead guilty to not building a mobile app, because I don't know how to build mobile apps. Right now I'm trying to kick a better API version out the door so that more capable people than me can.
Thank you for a quick reply! You are right, I didn't notice the responsiveness, my bad!
As for the Chrome extension, I had to use an alternative one, because the official one cannot be configured to have a single click to save - it shows up a menu from which I always need to pick one of similarly sounding options having to do with saving. I'd love to be able to disable the features I don't want, and have the tool lead directly to save if that's the only feature I have left working.
As for the mobile (iOS), the situation is really bleak, as most of the iOS apps seem to be abandoned, and the only one that seems to work fine for saving (Pins) has a weird way of syncing that only syncs up some number of latest pins, and then only being able to offer tags that are among those. This results in the app not offering the tags I am sure I have, and me mistyping them, and then making a mess in my tags.
Tbh, I have multiple times considered spending a day with Cline/Cursor to make a simple save-only iOS app, but then I always thought - wait, isn't that what I am paying a yearly subscription for?
So, for me, paths to saving (= main use case of Pinboard for me) are clunky on both browser and phone I use :/.
I don't want to hate, but talking in Kano model terms, while I really appreciate Pinboard being a stable and reliable service, over time these paper cuts shifted from nice to haves into a missing basic needs, which cause me to look into alternatives.
For the Chrome extension, I started by just getting compliant with manifest v3, so Chrome would stop complaining. But now that it's relatively fresh in my mind, I'm going to redesign it so that the most common case (save this page) is one-click.
I think the reason a lot of the mobile apps suck is that the API is underpowered to do what those apps need. Once I get the v2 API out the door, if it turns out that no one wants to build a proper modern app on it, I'll roll up my sleeves and do it myself. But getting that new API stable and running is top priority.
I would love to hear your thoughts about what a minimalist 'save only' iOS app should behave like, either here or at support@pinboard.in.
Btw, if you haven't yet tried Cline or some similar 'agent-like' developer environment, definitely do - I found it's great for doing easy work (on smaller projects) in a fields in which I don't have enough knowledge about eg. extension APIs, but I know enough about principles and web technologies to give a good code review. I imagine it could make adapting the Chrome extension much easier.
I like the fact that there are no new features. The service is mature and doesn't need any changes.
Also I use a bookmarklet on mobile (in a more easily-customized iOS browser called iCab), so I have no problems with responsive styling. Sometimes a minimum amount of effort is needed to make a service work the way you want it.
For a while a few years ago the service was unstable, but I haven't noticed any problems recently.
Have no recall of the service-owner's politics - but I do remember he is somewhat 'mercurial' in his emotions - and I've often wondered whether he will just decide to shutdown without warning.
Otherwise the service is minimal, no-nonsense, and no hassle. I don't get this post at all.
Pinboard has been up and running for 15 years. How many more years would I need to run the site before you'd decide I'm not going to shut it on a whim? Because I'll totally do that, just going on impulse right now.
IIRC you described it at some point as "business performance art", and may I please take this opportunity to thank you for creating this lens from which I have been able to view, understand, and not become infuriated at the last decade of hype-driven startups.
If you need any assistance with your infra stuff I'm happy to help.
> I’ve also had some issues in the past with the owner of Pinboard. I can’t recall the exact details of their political or other thoughts now, and don’t plan to look for them, but the site fell into my mental bucket of “services to reluctantly not recommend” a while back.
> Mental note: I need a bigger bucket.
This section really makes the author come across as "a hater", specially the last sentence. Like those people you meet that have a problem with everything. I'm being just a hater myself I guess. I never thought I needed to know the politics of the guy who delivers my mail so I also don't really care who made a website. Am I just too careless?
> This section really makes the author come across as "a hater", specially the last sentence. Like those people you meet that have a problem with everything.
Personally, it's just extremely hard to get me to recommend anything.
I use ubuntu+nvidia as my daily driver, at home and at work. But would I recommend it? Well....
[Update (2025-02-12): This post, which I thought of as a hasty update to the handful of people who followed my links, was posted to Hacker News for some reason. Yes, I should have provided evidence for the above judgment had I thought more people would read it. As ever, use your own judgment for these things.]
It covers the author's pre-judgement; he admits he didn't put in the work and he tells us to use our judgement and not his.
The part that's not addressed is "I want to reluctantly recommend even less services(/people?)." An eagerness to detract may not be hate but we're right to be wary of it.
Maciej is another "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"-type pundit - a.k.a. "smart-ss".
He is sometimes right (his analysis of website obesity), sometimes completely wrong (he argued at length during the COVID pandemic that Belarus was doing something right, when it was obvious from the beginning that it was just a dictatorship cooking numbers - confirmed by post-analysis that shows abnormal rounding and other aberrant distributions) and in both cases he will be insufferably confident and arrogant he got it right.
The kind of guy who never stops to ask himself if he could be wrong, instead devoting all his brainpower finding all the reasons you are certainly wrong. (Which, unsurprisingly, applies when a pinboard user asks for support, too.)
I think we could use more people like your description of him, frankly. There’s way too many zombies on the internet that have a societal need to be called out or corrected, Maciej style.
It’s not like this guy is a VC funded hack that takes orders for virtually every corporate policy decision while being prohibited from being brutally honest, or even plainly honest.
Seems unlikely that someone with this profile [0] would be an oligarch booster. It seems more likely that it's about Maciej's slow rightwards shift [1].
Because the "boosted Singal post" is a retweet of Singal saying this about the Onion:
"There's still some good onion but when it's cringe it's so cringe
I want the old onion back"
That's it. That's my alleged rightward shift.
Singal is considered a suppressive person on Bluesky and agreeing with him on anything is prima facie evidence of fascism. But I think this attitude says more about Anil and Bluesky than about me.
This is someone accusing me of transphobia in a situation where no one involved is trans, and no claims are being made about trans people. Which strikes me as extremely ageist.
This is clearly accusing a woman (Khelif) of being a male and only pretending to be female. And even if you pretend it isn't about her (just a poor timing, right?), what does "male competitors in women’s sports" designates if not trans people? After all, which "males" are allowed to compete in women's sports, Maciej, if not transgenders?
This is very disingenuous, and you seem to think you can bullshit people.
I am absolutely not accusing Khelif, or anyone else, of pretending to be something she's not. The evidence is clear she's a male athlete who grew up with a disorder of sexual development, but it's possible in that scenario to be raised as a girl and not learn of the condition until puberty. I think accusations of bad faith against Khelif are cruel.
To answer your second question, I don't think any male athlete should compete in women's sports, since it negates the purpose of having sex-segregated categories. I believe it's possible to preserve these categories without excluding or vilifying transgender athletes. And I think this sentiment is in line with the vast majority of people who understand there is a tension between affirming people's gender identity and being fair to female athletes.
("Ageist" is a joke about the non-sequitur accusations of transphobia I got in response to my tweet.)
You say she's male, but she says she's female. How can you square that with "I am absolutely not accusing Khelif of pretending to be something she's not" when you are absolutely accusing her of doing that?
As I asked the other sceptical commenter: how exactly would you explain XY karyotype, testosterone levels in the male range, and male-typical physique - other than by the athletes being male?
Also, we know that these three were deemed ineligible for future events under the revised World Athletics DSD policy which was developed with the intent of excluding male physical advantage from women's competitions.
Semenya's DSD (5-alpha reductase deficiency) is public knowledge due to the Court of Arbitration for Sport publishing a ruling revealing this. This is a DSD that only affects male sexual development, not female.
I don't have a link to the post (I don't use X these days) and I assumed illustrating recent sentiment would be sufficient for my counterclaim about what ailed the author.
Does it count as transphobia if your target is cis? On the one hand, such comments are motivated by a belief that trans people should be banned from a thing; on the other, we could just as easily view this through the lens of misogyny. Both lenses give the same explanation: a woman isn't stereotypically "womanly enough", therefore cruelty.
Can we draw a hard line between transphobia and misogyny? (Or is that a wrong question?)
This is a very misleading blog post. All evidence revealed so far indicates that Khelif is a male who was erroneously assumed to be female at birth due to having underdeveloped external genitalia.
In particular, a leaked medical report states that Khelif has a disorder of sexual development, specifically 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), which is consistent with this.
This isn't that uncommon an occurrence: most famously, Caster Semenya - another male athlete who competed in women's sport - has this condition. In fact every medal winner in the women's 800m at the 2016 Olympics was male.
Genetics isn’t as tidy as you seem to think. Many people with 5-ARD are born with functional vaginas. Personally, I call someone born with a vagina, who was raised as a woman, who identifies as a woman, who presents herself to the world as a woman, a woman.
I have no knowledge, nor interest in having knowledge, of the shape of any of those athletes’ genitals. That also means I have zero reasons, even specious ones, to doubt their sex.
It turns out the world is a lot more complex than we thought, and a lot of stuff we use to take for granted isn’t actually true. “XY is male” was a reasonable guess when we only had information on a few test subjects. Now that genetic testing is widespread, we know that’s not a hard and fast rule.
It's worth taking a step back to consider why we have separate categories for male and female sporting competitions, which is: the significant physical advantage that male development confers on an individual. If sports were mixed-sex, males would dominate almost every competition. So we have women's and girls' sports separate from males, to recognize and celebrate female athletic excellence.
With that in mind, it should be obvious why exclusion of male athletes from the female category is necessary: for fairness, and in contact sports like boxing, also safety.
The reason that males with 5-ARD have testosterone levels in the normal male range is that they have testes which produce it. They go through male puberty and thus have bodies which, in a competitive sports context, have the physical advantages conferred by male development.
These males have no female organs. Some develop a perineal pouch which may be mistaken for a vagina, but it isn't a vagina in the female sense - not anatomically nor histologically - and certainly isn't functional, given that the function of an actual female vagina is copulation and childbirth.
Whether they're raised as if they're female or believe themselves to be women isn't relevant in the context of competitive sport. The reason they should be excluded from the female category is the same as any other male: the categorical advantage from male development.
This is why it's so controversial that every medal winner in the women's 800m at the 2016 Olympics was male, and that two males took gold in women's boxing in the 2024 Olympics.
This argument devolves to "we can't let women compete until we dissect them".
At what point in a woman's competitive career do we decide that she's sufficiently talented that we have to examine her body and approve of her gender expression? Is it reserved for Olympic athletes? Or do talented college women need approval? Skilled high school students? A surprisingly good tee ball player?
Down this path lies madness.
You keep saying they're males as though it were fact and not your personal opinion. That's not at all a factual statement. Every bit of public information about these women says that they're women. Misgendering them isn't transphobia because they're not trans. They're cis woman and have been their entire lives.
Athletes competing on an elite level should certainly have their sex verified. In almost all cases this will be less intrusive than the anti-doping tests they're required to do; a simple cheek swab is sufficient for screening via karyotype analysis. And the blood samples already taken for drug testing can be used to measure testosterone levels for this purpose.
Only if there is an anomaly might further investigation be done, with the athlete's permission. No dissection is needed - at most some imaging to determine internal anatomy may be done by medical experts.
This is already the policy adopted by some sporting bodies, and was essentially the process used with the athletes I mentioned in my earlier comments to observe that the sex of each is male.
Ideally this would be done as early on in an athlete's career as is practical. It only needs to be done once, as a person's sex cannot change, and for most will be a straightforward confirmation of what is already known. Otherwise, it's better for the athlete too, to know sooner rather than later if there has been any anomalous development.
I would suggest you examine the public information on the aforementioned male athletes more closely. In particular, 5-ARD is an indisputably male condition; the mutations in the SRD5A2 gene that cause this have no effect on female sexual development. This is fact, not opinion.
Not sure if I understand where the complaint is coming from. Sounds like he was simply reminding everyone that you have to take one opinion or another. The term for those people who want to prohibit dissent is “fascist”.
Feel free to break it down for me though if you want since I can’t understand the issue, maybe it’s my learning disability.
I have always been ruthless about not following high-volume posters on Twitter, because I can’t consume that much content and I’m generally after high signal links and/or contact with people I know irl. So, I don’t follow pinboard, who’s a high volume poster, and I don’t have the mental energy to go track down sufficient material to prosecute him with evidence, online argument-style.
With that said, what Anil and the poster above seem to say is that Maciej is transphobic. The link above then quotes Maciej’s posts about some female boxer from Algeria, something else I know nothing about and am unqualified to speak on. These are presented with posts from some IOC boxing official that come across as entirely reasonable. In contrast, this post of Maciej’s works via insinuation:
“Watching male competitors in women’s sports is a lot like the Biden debate thing. Everyone can see with their own eyes what’s going on”
This might as well have been written by moldbug. It doesn’t come right out and say “hey this boxer is a man and shouldn’t be allowed to compete”; it says anyone can see with their own eyes. But the posts from the IOC official directly contradict this boxer is a man or trans. I don’t care enough to research this topic, so maybe I’m wrong, but I’m making a judgment based on pattern recognition and I’m free to do so.
I love many of Maciej’s blog posts. He feels to me like a fellow cynic, especially about the current tech industry. I have no idea what has compelled him to post about women’s Olympics boxing specifically, or transgender issues generally, but that he seems to be doing so changes my opinion of him, shifting him a bit more from “personally beloved Internet personality, of about the same age and perspective of my own” to “terminally online Internet commentator who can’t keep himself from posting tired perspectives about overdone topics that don’t benefit from his commentary, a la David Brooks.”
Having now compared him to moldbug and David Brooks, I fully expect him to roast me into eternity. In no way would I advocate any silencing of Maciej, nor does anyone else in this thread. There’s no fascism to be found. What I am trying to lay out for you, earnestly, are my own heuristics for deciding who and what I should spend my precious attention on. I will pay less attention to him now that I’ve seen examples of this style of argumentation from him about topics that are far-removed from importance. This is not fascism, but personal liberty.
If you spent money on a service you do not really need it matters, or at least it should be easy to see how it might matter. Continuing the payment and usage starts to be something of a social connection or a sign of support. More so if it is a one person enterprise. If it then becomes obvious that support might be misplaced separation is the logical step.
Big organisations are a different thing. And you can't pick your mail guy, plus the mail service is faceless as a whole. But think Tesla, there similar mechanisms make buying a car from them quite unattractive now.
> Why pay for a service, and have the little mental overhead of it existing, when I’ve duplicated it on my own site?
For me, because Pinboard has IFTTT integration where I can feed a whole bunch of things[0] into it automagically. None of the self-hosted services has IFTTT integration or, as far as I've seen thus far, webhook functionality I could feed from IFTTT[1].
I've got a self-made feed from Pinboard to a self-hosted linkhut which works fine (absent the archiving capability but I've never really used that anyway.)
[0] Although sadly that list does keep shrinking as arseholes close off / commercialise their APIs.
[1] A REST API doesn't work because they rely on setting the 'Authorisation' header which, AFAIK, isn't supported in IFTTT's webhook.
Just wanted to call out that linkhut does have IFTTT integration [0]. Although you will need to pay for an IFTTT developer account if you want to enable that on your self hosted instance. If you need help setting that up let me know, I’ll be happy to walk you through the process (and that way I can write documentation on how to do it).
Edit: I also was under the impression that one could use the webhooks integration [1] to make bespoke integrations (as the documentation says they support passing arbitrary request headers) but haven’t tried it myself, have you tried it and run into any issues? I’d also be happy to help improving support for that workflow.
People should use whatever site they find most useful. But I find the specific criticisms here baffling. To wit:
* "The site has barely changed in years/decades". That's kind of the point of the site! People ancient enough to remember Pinboard origins know that I cloned it off of del.icio.us after Yahoo made that site useless through repeated redesigns. The value proposition of Pinboard is that it endures, just like the stuff you archive there.
* The "add URL form is not responsive". I fixed this in early January, along with a raft of other updates targeted at phone users, as the author himself acknowledges. I've been working to get things looking neater on phones for a while now; bug reports about this are especially welcome.
* They don't like me and my politics are bad, for reasons they can't remember or articulate.
Again, you can dislike me and my website for any reason you want, but if you're going to publicly attack my livelihood, do it with more substance.
Agreed. The post is less critique than a weird traipse through the author's head. I can't tell why the post ended up on HN; the post doesn't even contain information on how the author built their new solution.
I joined Pinboard at a time when there was no recurring costs, just a small fee to join, for life. I think I paid $10 total, 12 or 15 years ago, and not a penny since. For that amount it's a pretty good deal.
It was a single email, in 2022, and the wording was exceptionally friendly!
(For those who don't know, the site moved to a subscription model in 2015 and I asked old-timers to consider converting their account voluntarily. Everyone who chose not to still has a lifetime membership to the site.)
I loved that earlier pricing model, where the cost increased with each sign-up. It may not have been sustainable in the long-term, but it was an interesting attempt to do something different.
I think a lot of people write their own bookmarking application in IT. I did. I like Pinboard's lean style; I hope to restyle my application to something similar.
Wild, that its been 15+ years since then. The price model was "it gets more expensive (the one time price) the more people join". I think it was less than 20 dollars for me, even way less.
[1]: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding