Drafts as a viable replacement for Pinboard?

Long time Drafts user here and also a Pinboard user. I’ve been looking around and haven’t been able to find anyone talking about this, but I’m considering the possibility that Drafts could be a viable replacement for Pinboard, or at the very least a good backup. Has anyone considered this or does anyone currently use Drafts as a means to store bookmarks with tags?

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As a pinboard user, I would never think of using Drafts as a viable replacement, and I’ve used Drafts coming up for 8 years this summer. This is principally because pinboard does what it does and does it very well. Horses for courses etc.

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Instead of Pinboard, you might want to try this https://raindrop.io

It does do it well. I’ve just been having a lot of problems with reliability when it comes to Pinboard over the last several months, especially working more on iOS. One of the chief reasons I love Pinboard so much is that the subscription is the business model and so I’m looking around for ways to leverage extensible tools I already use. I have about 40K bookmarks on Pinboard and ever if there was a service I use and would happily pay more for, it’s Pinboard.

Looks nice for sure. The MacStories folx seem to like it a lot. I may have to check it out. Thanks!

FWIW, it’s been fine for me on iOS recently. I use with the Pinner app, though I’m not sure if that is actively supported any longer. I dropped the archive bit a few years ago as I found I very rarely used it.

I just started with Raindrop.io about a month ago and it seems to work well. Have you figured out a good way to share URLs directly from a hotlink to raindrop via Drafts? Sometimes I want to right-click a URL and send it straight to raindrop for reading later, instead of opening the browser, waiting for the page to load, then triggering the browser plug-in, then tagging, etc…

I think you can configure the ‘services menu’ to get the outcome that you want

Been thinking about this one since I first saw it posted. I’m a fully paid-up Pinboard user, and I’ve also dabbled with Raindrop and Diigo. I like Raindrop’s visual bookmarking, collections and collaboration features, and the subscription fee for “pro” features is reasonable, but Pinboard does pretty much eveything I need and having been a Pinboard user for so long, I do feel a degree of loyalty there. My first thought in response to the OP’s question was much like many of the following posts— bookmark managers are good for what they do. But I wonder if it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

While there are benefits to dedicated bookmarking tools (the two that come to mind being duplicate detection and the option for social/collaboration features), the big thing for me is that I’d push links to whatever the tool I was using to manage them, then largely never see them again.

These days, I use Reeder as my “read it later” service. If I need/want to cache a page for future access, I’ll clip it to Evernote. And if it’s something I just think I’ll need to refer to in the future, I’m now (shock! horror!) pushing it to Drafts with bit of copied text from the page and a short note on what made me want to save it.

Sure, I lose the ability to maintain an RSS-accessible links archive, sure; and if I’m not mindful, I can post the same link a couple of times (though that in itself signals a few different things). But it means one less siloed tag system to maintain (I’d love to know how people comfortably maintain the integrity of their tag systems between different apps…). Since I spend most of my time in Drafts anyway, I’m much more likely to review links I put there, and links I’ve saved can show up in appropriate search queries. And it does encourage me to be far more mindful about what I save.

For me, this is just another variation on the idea that the best camera you have is the one you always have with you. Maybe the best bookmark manager is the one you’ll actually use in a meaningful way.

So, horses for courses, and I appreciate the value of dedicated software for specific tasks, but all told, I don’t think this is such a bad idea.

Quick update on my workflow here. I don’t use Drafts as a bookmark manager. I’m pretty much a Raindrop user now, although Pinboard will always hold a place in my heart. That said…

My Raindrop bookmarks are automatically captured to Drafts.

It’s an ongoing experiment. I get the best of both worlds: Raindrop affords me all of the best functions of a bookmark manager (dead link detection, archive pages, protection against duplicate bookmarks, tag management etc). And in Drafts, I can search my notes and my Raindrop references simultaneously.

My Raindrop bookmarks drafts are tagged, so it should be a trivial matter to purge my Drafts database of bookmarks if I decide that this is impractical. Thus far, it’s proven useful.

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