It's weird. The exact same problem affects to-do apps and note taking apps. I'm pretty sure it was a HN post I recently read where the problem of to-do apps was discussed. People go through phases: discover an app, start with a clean slate, get a better night's sleep because you get to write down all the things you're definitely going to do, work your way through x% of the list, gradually accumulate a list of things you shamefully failed to do, and eventually getting thoroughly depressed with the app and stop using it (or nuke the list every few months). Browser tabs are just another to-do list. So are those kitchen drawers, garden shed workbenches with half finished projects on them, tech books you insist that you'll read, and Udemy courses you bought in a sale and never used. These things all remind me of the 90 year old man who lives half a mile from my house, who has two beautiful old cars in his garage. One is an Austen A30, the other a '65 Jaguar S-Type. Both sit quietly rusting under disintegrated tarps. I'm sure he must have had dreams of fully renovating them when he bought them 30 years ago, but he knows that when he dies they'll end up as scrap, or maybe as some other retired gentleman's project that'll never get completed, and whenever he sees them, I'm sure it eats away at him, like the rust eats his cars.

You're likely thinking of "We Still Don't Get Things Done", posted 11 days ago:

https://www.wired.com/story/to-do-apps-failed-productivity-t...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28010716

And yes, there's a lot there that resonated strongly with me.

The cars-under-tarps anecdote is an excellent one. As life goes on, one accumulates an ever-growing list of gates which have closed irrevocably behind one. The German word Torschlusspanik is a brilliant invocation of this. The English equivalent is roughly "mid-life crisis", though the German captures far more of the essence and slowly-building grief.

https://blogs.transparent.com/german/torschlusspanik/

There's saying (memory says Chinese though I'm unsure and can't locate it): a wise man is prepared to part with his possessions several times in his lifetime. That might extend to dreams and expectations as well as physical cargo.

Funny to come across this thread. Just a week ago my best friend had been moaning for two years about tidying his garage. I came with two beers intent on a chill weekend watchinh olympics but I happened to run into his wife as she was parking her car in the garage. We spoke for a minute but I decided we'd rather start working on his garage. My friend came out and we started. A few hours later, tired and hungry, his SO served us with a pretty full meal which is both extraordinary and unusual since Ive never been given anything by her in the ten years we've known each other nor have I seen her cooking. I have no doubt my boy got some that night but it was satisfying to just work and do something useful to bond.

I think there is something fundamentally ancient about it, like how young women braid each others hair and probably been doing it since year one of humanity's existence. Maybe we need others to get things done. Maybe the man would jumpstart his passion if someone shared his thing for restoration.

I dont really know.

Now that you mention it, it seems that there is indeed a phenomena worth exploring here.

I may have done many things in life that I perceive to be valuable for our family, but nothing earned me as many 'points' with Mrs. as did the act of just sucking it up and cleaning the entire garage one day.

Phenomena is the plural of phenomenon.

>> Maybe we need others to get things done. Maybe the man would jumpstart his passion if someone shared his thing for restoration.

I think there is a lot of truth to this actually. Admittedly I'm a little sleep deprived right now in that way that leads you reading a statement and feeling it is incredibly profound in a way you might not otherwise... but still I think you are really onto something.

Working with someone smooths out the edges well when things go poorly (if something goes wrong and you are alone it is easier to be grumpy about it than if you have someone with you to say "oh well, we can do X instead" or "It doesn't really matter"), they make the work feel seen and therefore feel more valuable. I can enjoy cooking for (and especially with my partner) but I can never be bothered to really cook for myself, even if I'd enjoy the meal more in the end it doesn't feel worth the time and energy investment when I could just slap together a sandwich or something.

This extends to hobby projects as well in a big way, perhaps even more. Sure I could spend hours painting a picture and have people say "wow, that's impressive" (this is just an example, I can't actually paint), but it feels hard to justify when I have other things I might need to do. If someone else is working on the same thing with you it makes you feel like you are investing that time in them, which is inherently fulfilling.

Even in your example of you helping your friend, once they've accepted you are helping they will feel like every bit of work they do will make your life easier. It's less intense but they will still feel like they are contributing to your efforts in someway, or at least like they are working towards a mutual goal instead of something kind of isolated.

Good explanation of something that I've felt and discussed a few times before.

I've stopped using todo apps and just write the daily/weekly list of high-prio items in my paper notebooks. That way it doesn't accumulate a bunch of items that'll I'll likely never get too. The most important things will resurface anyway.

I feel much better not dragging along a list that keeps growing. Sure, that means I'll sometimes forget or be late or need reminding, but from my perspective, that's an acceptable trade-off.

I have a short list of daily todos that include six subjects that I want to focus on. If I do something towards that task, I add a checkmark for every day of every month. It is interesting to see how consistent or inconsistent I am with tasks over time. This is primarily motivation towards learning basics or attempting master of something.

People should be taught to pursue things on a daily basis from a young age. I think it helps temper expectations about what can actually be done over time, which is not a skillset I had when I was younger: I was in constant pursuit of too many things all of the time.

Check out BrainTool (https://braintool.org) it's a browser extension that allows you to trivially add pages to a custom hierarchal 'Topic tree' along with notes on why you're saving the page, and then to control opening and closing tabs by topic. Everything is saved to an org-mode syntax text file. So of your requirements it's persistent, local, tagged and entirely-offline-usable. Incremental search is in the works.

It works with tab groups on Chrome, Edge and Brave which adds another step toward keeping your browser organized.

It might fit your workflow and be what you need!

To save others the click: it doesn't work with Firefox.

Why would they? It's local, thus, not saleable information.

Incentives misallignment is a major component of my disillusionment.

It's possible that a non-Google vendor might see the approach as a differentiator. Of these, Mozilla seems to be footgunning itself with exceptional facility, Apple would serve only its own hardware platforms in all likelihood, and the remaining players (KDE / Webkit) are so small as to be utterly outclassed.

The remaining possibility would be a generalised HTTP/HTML (and if possible other document markup) programming libraries.

Let's work on Servo! It's not completely dead. Super users building a browser for super-users.

Does anyone know how to build a modular plugin sub-system?

> Let's work on Servo! It's not completely dead. Super users building a browser for super-users.

Please do!

I already sent some money in that direction and will be happy to send more.

I will also be happy to test it (commit to 1-2 hours or maybe more pr week of actual following-a-plan testing not just "using it and see if it works" for a few weeks) but I am afraid I can't learn enough Rust to be helpful at the moment (small kids and a full time job).

TIL. Links?

This? https://servo.org/

ArchiveBox is built to solve most of those issues, but it's not great at categorization beyond tagging (e.g. no nested folders or stuff like that).

Pinboard.in seems okay though

That or Wallabag, both of which I've read quite a bit about but not tried.

Self-hosted Wallabag is ... on my to-do list.

self-hosted pinboard https://github.com/jonschoning/espial

An very important feature IMO is autocomplete for tags.

I dont recall if pinboard actually had this, but its something i could probably add.

I use Pocket a lot. There are like 10 easy feature requests I'd love for them to do but I find it at least usable for storing stuff and finding it later once you get used to it. Most of the problems in that post have been at least partly addressed, although I don't ever use tags so have no comments about those.

> There are like 10 easy feature requests I'd love for them to do

Consider that if Mozilla hadn't lied about how it was going to open source it when they announced they were buying Pocket (alternatively, if people actually held them accountable instead of demonstrating that the public's short memory means that you can lie about pretty much anything), then someone would have probably fixed at least a few of those.

If all you're doing is using it to store stuff, then instead of signalling to a company that bad behavior pays off by rewarding them for it, consider using Zotero instead, which doesn't have a history of being insultingly mendacious and by default keeps your data private (in the form of reliable, bog standard files on your own disk). Or, if you're willing to suffer through slightly more geekery, there's Perkeep/Camlistore.

One of my main use cases of Pocket is basically using it like a podcast app (via text2speech and syncing across different devices) with highlighting capability. I've created some of my own workarounds for its failings (such as not being able to save articles behind some paywalled websites).

I'd ideally like to move to something else but I haven't found an alternative that's as good. Not being able to export my data, do any kind of advanced searching, or access a few of my files in Pocket really does suck.

I see Zotero has a third-party Android app, maybe I'll try that and see if it is decent.

you could run my self-hosted bookmarking site locally (which includes basic notes) https://github.com/jonschoning/espial