Where does one store favorite links so I can handle them on phone and two separate machines?

On your ftp account, where else?

I prefer to telnet it over with a bespoke protocol loosely based on gopher.

Hold on, let me spin up my IMP nodes first.

that sounds like the lazy guy's way of doing it.

What can I say, the product guys have gotten to me. This was an MVP approach.

Yeah, real nerds build their own router for maximum bespokeness.

Wonderful comment. Thanks : - )

You value the syncing browser accounts offer. Personally I like being able to go between several of my own computers and not have all settings synced. It's not a fresh slate situation but it is a bit freeing to not carry all my digital baggage all the time.

Good for you. Firefox accounts are optional.

Indeed. I happen to know this because I use Firefox on a daily basis and have never once been pestered to use one.

So a browser with accounts works for you. So your comment was irrelevant.

Wow, you sure got me. You want a medal or something?

This niche use case which offers a marginal benefit even to those who want it, is a laughable mask for the assembly and deployment of one of the world's largest data harvesting networks, the browser 'sync' account

On your personal homepage's bookmarks page.

What about bookmarks that I don’t necessarily want to be publicly known. Not even talking about anything potentially embarrassing. Things like where I bank or my doctor’s appointment booking page.

Presumably that's a small set of bookmarks which you could manage across devices.

Other options might be to have that personal homepage on a non-public machine (e.g., on your home or office LAN), behind a VPN, and/or password protected.

Another practice from days of yore was to export specific bookmarks and transfer those to other systems. This is indeed cumbersome with mobile browsers (I'm not sure these even offer bookmark import/export ... Looks as if that's synch-only for Firefox/Android, which is disappointing.

I just use my domain with a simple frontend for links

> Where does one store favorite links so I can handle them on phone and two separate machines?

Linkding: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

Linkding is great, and has some browser extensions to inject your favourites into relevant search pages on the likes of google, ddg, bing, etc, which was a nice idea I hadn't considered before

I'm using raindrop.io. So far, even the free tier works well for me.

Browsers shouldn't require accounts, and thankfully Firefox doesn't. But having a way to synchronize my passwords across all my devices is pretty important.

They had an implementation that did not require any accounts. They deemed that it's too confusing for users* to scan some QR codes (or type a bunch of characters), so they went with an account-based system.

*) Or whatever the real reason was. It was about time Mozilla started to have management issues so I absolutely won't be surprised if the goal was to "become an ecosystem" or "gather a userbase" (or whatever is management speak for forcing people to sign up).

> scan some QR codes

How is that not still an account? What definition of account are we working with here?

Maybe it was using technology similar to magic wormhole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G3_Xa1GBTs

https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

Sure, strictly speaking, of course there were accounts as in "database records". However, users gave no details about themselves, and haven't signed up for anything. No long-term credentials, just a rendezvous point.

You used to just open two Firefoxes, start sync setup on the one, copy (or scan) a code to another - boom, done, they're talking to each other.

It depends how you define an account. Is an account an email? Is an account an id in a database? An IP? You can't sync anything without an "account"

That’s what a password manager is for

Does your password manager require an account to sync between multiple machines?

I like that my browser (Vivaldi, Brave) has accounts so my phone, desktop (2x OS), and laptop (2x OS) are always completely in sync, with no downgraded functionality if I choose to not use an account.

Brave doesn’t have accounts, for privacy reasons. You sync via a.. private E2E (don’t know what else to call it) group you join via a key phrase.

It’s pretty easy to see a use case for a work account and a personal account - or accounts for five different users of a shared home computer.