Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots

Posted by mstef 4/14/2025

Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots(omnom.zone)

a bit of background. this is a rewrite of omnom by asciimoo - the guy who also made searx. originally i wrote omnom, back in the days when del.icio.us was enshittified and gone down the drain. instead of complaining i was taking the opportunity to write a replacement that i would want, it became omnom, and for many years me and a bunch of users were very happy with it.

but the fast moving world of browser extensions made maintenance (for a non-commercial free software side project) too expensive, so the extension support became erratic, until it died completely. for a year or two i didn't use it.

but then asked asciimo if he could have a look a the extensions (since he was recently working on another extension, so had some experience), he looked at it, and rewrote the whole thing in go and fixed the extension. he even got support from nlnet/ngi0.

if you want to have your own self-hosted libre software bookmarking service for you and your community, give it a go, it's very simple, privacy respecting and most robust when it comes to snapshotting. asciimoo did a great job.

214 points | 59 comments

renegat0x0 4/14/2025|

I love bookmarks. I have made RSS app with bookmarking mechanism.

My links about bookmarks and links below.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - django app, RSS client, simple web crawler, under construction

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - my bookmarks repository

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - RSS links for year 2025

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024 - RSS links for year 2024

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - RSS links for year 2023

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - I also maintain a list of domains found in the Internet

https://rumca-js.github.io/search - search that uses links maintained in zip files

https://rumca-js.github.io/music - my music library, browsable

https://rumca-js.github.io/bookmarks - my bookmarks, browsable

cookiengineer 4/14/2025|

Damn this is internet gold. Gonna be lost in those repos for days, man.

Awesome work!

mbreese 4/14/2025||

I've been using Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) for a few months. So far, I like it. I particularly like having an iOS app so sharing new bookmarks from different apps is really easy. Instead of pulling from the browser, it retrieves its own copy with a headless Chrome, so if you need a login, the snapshot breaks. But, overall, I've been pretty happy.

But, I'll definitely check out Omnom too!

https://karakeep.app/

crossroadsguy 4/14/2025||

After quite some exploring around and struggles I made my peace with https://raindrop.io. Am I happy with that? Of course not. But that's the only hosted one which has extensions and apps for almost every browser and OS I use. I wish there a functional open source service (hosted) with wide range of platforms support that I could pay for and use.

Onawa 4/14/2025||

I agree, I made my peace with Raindrop.io as well. Being able to use it on any system and most any browser, plus a full API for interacting with my bookmarks. Nothing free and open source compared and now I have 6k+ bookmarks in Raindrop that I would like to move elsewhere, but I'll have to check out the project linked here.

YalebB 4/14/2025|||

I made an app for this actually, called Showcase. You can bookmark any content——Youtube videos, websites, Tweets, Instagram posts—— and store it all together. You can use it on browser where you can paste directly onto the canvas (+ chrome extension coming) or iOS that has a Share Extension too.

It's also free ;)

Demo for Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehGolVAHm8U

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/showcase-co/id6740991352?platf...

T0Bi 4/14/2025|||

Looks really nice. ETA on play store release? Or do you have a alpha/beta apk?

theeasyway 4/14/2025|||

Oh wow this is super nice I'll definitely be using this

rendaw 4/15/2025||

Does Omnom not? They have FF and Chrome extensions...

mazsa 4/14/2025||

I know OP personally and have a high regard for him. His blog at https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/ is also worth following.

pratio 4/14/2025||

I have settled on https://readeck.org/ it's absolutely brilliant. It supports postgres and a service with systemd. omnom looks promising, will keep an eye on it.

smeej 4/14/2025||

My dream tool allows me to create snapshots from either mobile or desktop browser, then read and highlight on my Android eInk reader or phone, then export my highlights and notes into Logseq...all without collecting all my data and selling it to advertisers (which basically leaves me with FOSS tools).

Omnivore was as close as I've ever gotten to this dream, even though their Android app wasn't great and certainly didn't have an "eInk pagination" option, but Readeck is at least giving me some hope again once Omni sold out.

YalebB 4/14/2025|||

I encourage you to check out my app ;)

Demo for Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehGolVAHm8U

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/showcase-co/id6740991352?platf...

pratio 4/15/2025||

Your app looks really and the website is also cool but Readeck and Omnom are both selfhosted bookmark managers. A cool app is good to have but not a requirement.

manosyja 4/15/2025|||

Use readeck, too. It’s exactly what I need, the only feature I miss is not being able to add arbitrary comments to text passages.

mstef 4/14/2025|||

looks nifty, but does it do snapshotting?

pratio 4/14/2025|||

It also does highlighting which is absolutely amazing. No need to save an entire page just for a piece of text. Also, you can have opds for ebooks.

braggerxyz 4/14/2025|||

Yes it does. Also written in Go and pretty hackable.

osipov 4/14/2025||

the only factor that's stopping me from moving to readeck is a lack of import functionality for evernote bookmarks. otherwise, i'd be 100% on readeck.

MrJohz 4/14/2025||

I've wanted something like this for a while, although I've not looked into it much.

That said, the snapshot search either isn't working, or isn't doing what I'd expect it to do. If I search for `fsf`, the snapshot search finds the FSF's website. But if I search for text that appears in the snapshot of the homepage (e.g. "sysop" or "sysops"), then I get no results.

I would expect the snapshot search to work roughly like Google, but for these limited snapshots of pages, but it appears to only search the URLs, maybe the page titles?

asciimoo 4/14/2025|

You can find detailed search (including title/content) using the bookmarks endpoint. Snapshot search is currently only for finding multiple snapshots for a single URL/domain. Probably it should be emphasized, or content based search should be available there as well. Thanks for the feedback!

apitman 4/14/2025||

Since it requires a browser extension anyway, is it possible to build something like this local-first and lean on Chrome/Firefox built-in syncing?

jonotime 4/14/2025|

+1 for local-first. there needs to be a local first bookmark/snapshot manager. where you can own your data without requiring hosting or installing things.

cyberge99 4/15/2025||

Buku does this. You have to run bukubrowse server locally, but the extension then connects to localhost. I have a cli that lists my bookmarks and makes it easy for me to copy/paste or clickopen.

amit9gupta 4/14/2025||

After trying many bookmarking solutions, settled on Goodlinks.

Pros: - stores data in your icloud - stores a copy where possible - full-text search

Cons: - not open-source - works on mac/ios only

https://goodlinks.app/

dewey 4/14/2025|

I wish ArchiveBox had such a feature where you can archive “private” and logged in pages. I often had the case where I then realized I only archived some login page.

5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E 4/14/2025||

I use Linkding for my bookmarking. It has the ability to snapshot the links by using SingleFile, which is super handy cause it produces a single .html file that you can send or save separately if you want.

To save logged in content, you can either pass it cookies.txt with the login cookies it needs, and it works pretty well. Alternatively, you can also use the SingleFile extension to snapshot what you want and upload it in place of the automated snapshot. This is also handy because the extension allows you to remove private data prior to screenshot, such as your name or username.

I personally have cookies in place for most common social media sites that need login (twitter, reddit), and if I need to snapshot something else occasionally, I do it manually and upload it to Linkding.

https://linkding.link/

https://linkding.link/archiving/

https://www.getsinglefile.com/

dewey 4/14/2025||

ArchiveBox also supports SingleFile from what I remember, but I wish there was a extension to just pass everything (Browser context) to ArchiveBox. Having to keep cookies in sync with a second service is a bit of a hassle.

5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E 4/14/2025||

If you read the Linkding archiving page, you can see that it is possible to set up SingleFile extension to auto-snapshot the page when the page is added, from the browser you're using at that moment. The advantage is that loing is handled implicitly, but a disadvantage is that this only works in the browser, and not for example when you use the Android app. But for me that's fine,

Also, it is possible to configure SingleFile extension to automatically push a snapshot to a REST Form API. You can even make it do so when you bookmarks something in your browser, to achive a flow where bookmarking something in the browser saves the page via SingleFile extension and gives it to ArchiveFile.

https://docs.archivebox.io/dev/Contents.html#api-reference

Also, look in the SingleFile extension options, under Destination.

dewey 4/14/2025||

That sounds like that does the job, thanks! I’ll try to set this up.

kapnobatairza 4/14/2025||

You can pass cookies or Chrome user data into ArchiveBox, but you do risk account suspensions if your account gets flagged for scraping.

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