This is about self-hosting bookmark software. If you're not into self-hosting or if that's too complex, I don't have a good solution to present to you, unfortunately. Pinboard is excellent, but the archiving leaves a lot to be desired.

I used to use Pinboard, the excellent social bookmarking site, for saving things. One of the best features of Pinboard is server-side archiving, where the server will save a copy of what you’ve saved so that when the site inevitably 404s, you’ll have a copy. Even when I was an active user in ~2016, though, the archiving aspect always left something to be desired. For starters, archiving web content losslessly has always been a challenge. Thanks to JavaScript heavy rendering, fancy CSS, and other dynamic page changing technologies, like infinite loading, it’s kind of always been difficult to archive web content. I have therefore always been unsatisfied with this.

But as time has progressed, more and more sites have added a new complication: just straight-up blocking web scrapers. This basically makes server-side archiving in a naive way impossible. You might get lucky and find a site like this one, where archiving serve-side is trivial, but the odds decrease as time goes on.

Enter my new preferred setup for bookmarking and archiving: Linkding and SingleFile. Linkding is incredibly easy to self-host as a tiny Docker container that stores data in sqlite. There is a Linkding container that contains SingleFile as a serverside component, but it isn’t actually necessary if you want to use the SingleFile extension. When you use the Linkding and SingleFile extensions in concert, each bookmark will automatically save a copy of the website rendered from your browser! This trivially defeats any anti-bot system and ensures that if you can see it locally, it’s probably saved correctly.

Obviously you have to have the ability to self-host Linkding for this setup to work, but if you’re technically capable, it’s so easy to run, I really think anyone can do it with relative ease.

ArchiveBox is a very similar platform to consider if you're interested in this type of thing. The downside is that it's less of a bookmark program and more of an archiving program. It also kind of assumes you want server-side crawling first, which I've given up on. You can use an extension too, but it's not something I've wanted to deal with since it has a lot of dependencies predicated on server-side crawling.

If you want to archive PDFs, save them locally. If you want to archive YouTube videos, use yt-dlp. If you want to archive other video content, probably around the Internet in any way, use yt-dlp. If you're on macOS, Downie is worth trying. If you want to download image galleries, try gallery-dl.