Using Karakeep as my personal internet
karakeep-app
How often did you saw something interesting, but forgot what exactly it was after a short period.
When I started selfhosting I wouldn't expect, that one of my most frequently used services would be Karakeep (formerly known as Hoarder). When dumbed down it's a bookmark manager. You can use it as such, but it doesn't really make sense doing so.
The thing which makes Karakeep really fantastic is its search capabilities. Everything you bookmark is vector-embedded with ElasticSearch. This way, you find literally everything you saved and want to retrieve.
I search "RSS" and every single item gets listed, regardless of whether "RSS" is literally included in the text. Everything about that is so incredibly handy.
Furthermore you can use the extension for Firefox and Chromium, that allows you to one-click a website to add it to Karakeep. The nice thing is, because of ElasticSearch, you don't have to think much about whether this creates unnecessary noise and pollutes your instance. You don't have to organize the instance the same way you don't have to organize the web. It can be as crowded as it wants to be, you just search what you're interested in and everything becomes a matter of search engine quality. For me, if I find something remotely interesting, I'd better add it now... better safe than sorry.
This is such a great workflow because it's easy, scalable and doesn't require any thinking (comparing to some of the note taking workflows with Notion or Obsidian). I never felt my Karakeep instance is to crowded even though I have 500 bookmarks already.
Sometimes I simply scroll through my Karakeep instance and still find interesting stuff I completely forgot about. For me Karakeep is a personal web search engine with results which are 100% fitted to my interests.
Apart from that, Karakeep also has automatic tagging with AI. While I don't find these tags particularly useful, I think they look nice. One can also use predefined tags, but for me I wasn't able to compile a list broad enough to categorize every item I have. Also you can add basic notes, create offline copies, all the good stuff. The app is nice too and on Android it's super easy to add a link via the share feature.
The one thing I'm not really fond of is the note capabilities. It does have markdown, though without automatic formatting e.g., it doesn't create a new dash when using a list. I wanted to use it as a shopping list, because dumping even that highly temporary stuff in it doesn't feel as severe as doing it in Obsidian, but yeah... it isn't a good text editor, unfortunately.
You should host Karakeep and follow this website via RSS or Email! Thank you very much.
My stats
The Activity by Hour is super interesting, because it accurately resembles my daily creativity cycle