Bookmarking tools suck

IndieWebClub prompt: what is the smallest hill you want to die on?

My answer: references are enriched links and bookmarks are the same thing as references. I want to be able to

• preserve my pointer to an outside resource

• accrete my own context around it

  LIterally the last tool I used that supported a workflow to my satisfaction was Evernote, for a brief shining period in 2016. (Possibly times were simpler then.)

  • I want to handle BibTeX references, code repo references, and URLs.
    • I wan to bookmark all these link types easily from anywhere I browse.
  • I want these all to canonicalize, so references to the same resource from different places add to an MTIMES list.
    • I also, ideally, want them to fuzzy canonicalize, so that bookmarks for different commit-ids for the same repo (I can think of more examples) point to each other.
  • I want to be able to browse all my bookmarks.
  • I want when I link to a thing for it to go "via" my own note for that thing, if I have a note for it.

You know, it all seems simple. I wish there was a tool for it I could use out of the box. I wish there was at least an idiom that saw widespread use. As it stands, what I've got are Gwern's Design page, ekg's approach to using triples as a linking mechanism, and a TO_THINK mental laundry list for how knowledge graphs work, what they get right, and what the pitfalls are.

Pitfalls of thinks, in particular, are important. By linking to my note for a resource, and having only one outgoing link:

• I make linkbacks and trackbacks harder for folks that get linked to.
• I reduce outgoing link liveness, becuase I don't make a new direct link to a resource when I refer to it.

But I also

• make it easier to implement archivers.
• collate/index all the reasons that I care about an external resource, which makes for a worse wiki but a better reference.

I'm making a choice to ensmallen the interface between my corner of the internet and the wider thing. Am I "robbing the commons" of the links I would have otherwise made? Or am I cleaning it up?

(Or am I making my corner "cozier"? Keeping house in a way that is systematic and machine-legible, but deliberately unfriendly to scrapers and analytics?)

At any rate, I don't actually have a complete solution to the thing I want, not even the simplest version of the thing. Every time I try to solve it, I get waylaid by the philosophy. Ruthless highwayman, ruler of every third road in my head. 😔