I like to save things. Particularly interesting websites and news articles. Some of them are just for my personal use (projects I want to work on, etc.) and some are for inclusion in one of my newsletters: either When The Going Gets Weird, which is a daily collection of interesting and/or weird news stories and links, or The Torment Nexus, which is a weekly long-form analysis of a topic related to technology and society (both are published for free here on my website and also on Ghost and Substack). If for whatever reason you don’t save bookmarks — perhaps you live in the moment, perhaps you have a photographic memory — this post is unlikely to be of interest to you! But if you do save a lot of bookmarks, a tool called Raindrop is one of the best I have found for doing so.
For an indication of my bookmark-hoarding problem, I currently have about 170,000 bookmarks and links saved in Raindrop, in a variety of folders. For many years I used Instapaper for doing this, but it was a little too sparse for my liking, both in terms of the UI and the features it included. I switched to Pocket for awhile, because it had a more visual interface and was owned by Mozilla, and I eventually built up a huge repository of links there, but last year Mozilla said it was shutting the service down. Like many others, I had to not only export hundreds of thousands of bookmarks but also find a new home for them, so I researched a bunch of different open-source options, and wound up with Raindrop (I’m sure there are others that work for you and that’s fine).
The process of exporting 150,000 bookmarks and then importing them into a new service is not one I would recommend, since most services can’t handle that kind of load all at once, so you have to do it in batches. If you go here, you can see the conversation between me and the obviously irritated developer/maintainer (I assume) when I complained that the import of my hundreds of thousands of bookmarks from Instapaper kept failing — it handled the import of a huge number from Pocket, but when I tried to import from a CSV I downloaded from Instapaper the service kept giving me an error that said “You creating enormous load. Contact with us.” So I sent emails but got no response.
As you can see from the Reddit thread, the maintainer said “We do not have a total limit of bookmarks you can add to Raindrop. But we do prevent importing 100,000+ of bookmarks in short period of time. Please wait a week, when you will be able to import more.” So long story short, that’s what I did and it worked great. I don’t know who I was speaking with, but both the website and Google Play say Raindrop is the work of Rustem Mussabekov, a young developer originally from Kazakhstan who now reportedly lives in St. Petersburg.
One of the best parts about Raindrop is that it saves a copy of the website, so that if the article disappears or becomes unobtainable for some other reason, there is a local copy to refer to. It also has auto-tagging and auto-filtering built in, to make organizing easier, and full-text search. It’s also cross-platform — you can add an extension to any browser to save links, and you can access your links either through raindrop.io or through apps for both iPhone and Android. And so far both the service and its apps and website have been rock-solid even when filtering or moving hundreds of thousands of bookmarks. If you are in the market for a bookmark manager, I highly recommend Raindrop (I am not getting paid for this endorsement, for the record, just a fan).