20 years after del.icio.us

If my files are correct, on this day, 20 years ago, I started using the open bookmarking service del.icio.us. Often depicted as one of the posterchild of the web-two-point-o era, with this anniversary of my personal usage of it, I wanted to reflect exactly on that: what del.icio.us meant to me and what happened to open bookmarking.

I remember fondly discovering http://del.icio.us, maybe first because of its strange name. Early 2000 was still a time when most websites names started with double-you-double-you-double-you (or “ouéouéoué” if you said it in french) and ended with dot-com or dot-net or dot-org. And that was about it. Delicious here broke all the rules and even used a top level domain, dot-US, not to describe a geographically relevant website, but to make a funny sounding and definitely memorable url.

I’m pretty sure this domain name confused a lot of people and participated in making the service only accessible to the most savvy Internet users at the time. And that’s also why I probably loved it immediately. It had that techie, private club, early adopter feel that most social webthings bet upon to attract their first cohort of fans.

The second aspect that got me hooked pretty early on was that most of the creators and artists I was following at the time had started using the service. That’s probably how I found it in the first place. And the fascinating thing was that they were sharing their bookmarks with everyone. So not only could I follow their blog or wherever they were posting at the time, I could also peek into what they were following and where their “surfing” habits brought them. I could access their “sources”.

It’s really that social aspect of openly sharing what we found interesting online that made del.icio.us an instant hit. Websearch was ok at the time. I mean, Google existed and was the best search engine around. But the web was growing rapidly and there was not one news website or blog or Yahoo sub-sub category that could curate all the new stuff fast enough. Until the power of the crowd came in, and that’s exactly what del.icio.us made possible.

The novelty of del.icio.us could be told like this. If I found something interesting online, instead of bookmarking it in my browser, which made it extremely vulnerable to a computer crash and loss of data, I could save it online (in the cloud, as we say now) and suddenly make this bookmark accessible to everyone. Instead of having to decide in which folder I wanted to store it, I could just attach a few words (tags) of my own choosing, and the “organization” of my bookmarks would be “done by itself”, grouping similar links based on these particular words.

Multiplying this by the number of people using del.icio.us, now my best links are grouped with other people’s bookmarks tagged with the same words, allowing me to find similar or equally interesting pages than the one I just found. On top of that, I could also now access all the links from that other person that just had saved the same thing I did and thus find potential like-minds with more interesting things for me. The front page of del.icio.us would feature hour by hour the most bookmarked links and was, as well, an incredible source of new trends.

As I’m writing this, I realize people will say this looks like their experience of social media today. And they’d be right. For me, this experience first materialized in del.icio.us. And it’s “social media” that somehow killed del.icio.us and bookmarking altogether. I’m making shortcuts here. I don’t think it’s social media that killed del.icio.us, since del.icio.us was social media itself, but the constant change of corporate ownership and competition that killed it.

The incredible value of the service was obvious, to individuals and businesses. But steering a social media website is hard. Small changes can improve it or destroy it. We’ve seen this happen a lot since these early days of Web 2.0. And, I could be wrong, but quick changes in ownership are probably not the best thing for a service like this. Today, we’d say the enshitification of del.icio.us came quickly. At every merge and acquisition, the new owner wanted to squeeze more out of it. And other social media platforms, with their own value propositions, imposed their way of social sharing.

That’s when I decided to move all my personal stuff from del.icio.us to Shaarli, an open source self-hosted bookmarking service. And I’ve been hosting it like this ever since. You can find all my bookmarks on my server at https://b.xuv.be ( /b is for bookmarks. xuv.be is my domain name. You might find a similar look between that version of Shaarli and the del.icio.us look of 2004). While self-hosting is great, it allows me to check my bookmarks from anywhere and allows others to follow them too, it does not offer any of the added value of sharing bookmarks with millions of people at-once, like del.icio.us did. And I dearly miss that aspect.

Now, are people still bookmarking? I know some of my friends do and I follow their self-hosted Shaarli. But I think the practice has mostly vanished. Or we’re mostly back to saving a few links in our browsers for immediate and temporary access. Social organization of bookmark seems pretty dead too. When people find an interesting webpage now, they micro-blog it on Mastodon, LinkedIn or whatever social media you are using. But that’s not close to the social organization of bookmarks del.icio.us was offering. It’s even quite hard these days to make sense of what are the most popular links around a topic.

I hope I don’t sound too old or too bitter when I say that all this human organization of the web has been replaced by “algorithms”. Whether it’s PageRank from Google (or whatever the enshitificated evolution of it is called now), Reddit’s social recommendation or FaceTube engagement algorithms, all these seem to drive what surfaces as most popular things people look at online.

I, myself, have (mostly) stopped bookmarking also. Doing a data analysis of my Shaarli would probably surface that I’ve been bookmarking much less in the recent years. Maybe because websearch has replaced the need for it. Or because the web changed and keeping a curated list of individual pages isn’t needed anymore.

We haven’t talked about link rot yet. Funny or not, that bookmark I made in February 2006 is still working. I don’t remember why I saved that Internet Anagram Server. But I’m glad I did because to this day it’s still a useful tool. It could be fun to look at the 3000+ links I saved over the years and see which ones are still working.

To close this reflection, I think there still is a lot of value in making human curated shared lists of interesting things, as the “awesome list” movement on Github shows. It’s unfortunate that it seems there is no good tool today to do this and that it might require some centralized corporate service to work.

Shaarli is great, and you should use it, even if it will never offer that super-crowd-sourced-power thing that makes social bookmarking so awesome. It’s probably the closest feeling you’ll get to del.icio.us.