Bookmark.org is a simple archiving service. Give it links, and it creates archives for you.

Nov 16, 2022 • 7 min read

Why archives?

Today, much of our life and culture exists in digital form. Unfortunately, many important digital artifacts are lost to history. Bookmark is building digital archives to enlighten humanity and to withstand the test of time.

💫 The purpose of archives

Consider this: Archives preserve our collective knowledge over time – they are collections of intentions for the future. They are low time preference.

The purpose of archives are not to “keep everything”, but rather to keep specific things selected by specific people for specific reasons. Archives are a testimony to the achievements of human thought.

This distinction has been lost in the modern world of technology where information is cheap and abundant – but knowledge and wisdom are rare. Not everything is worthy of archiving. So what makes the cut?

🙏 Archivists are benefactors

Archivists are like benefactors – identifying, classifying, and preserving the value of the past for the benefit of the future. We want to make this practice more accessible, and more suited for a digital world.

The human instinct to collect and share information is not well served by the current generation of digital tools. A generation of young people are growing up in walled gardens and do not know the open internet.

Bookmark.org represents a new way to aggregate, preserve, and share future intentions for generations to come. Imagine a world in which your great grandchildren refer to the archives you create. That’s why you should start archiving on Bookmark.org today.

⚖️ Restoring the human-curated internet

We believe in an independent and global internet, made up of humans interacting and contributing as equal peers with transparent rules. Too much of the internet has been given over to unaccountable algorithms. We are working to reverse that trend.

🔗 A market for preserving links

Who decides what information to preserve? Traditional archives have been funded by governments, large corporations, or large donors.

Bookmark.org believes that individuals acting in their own best interest will make the right decisions about what to archive and preserve for the future, not large bureaucratic organizations with uncertain goals.

• Bookmark.org creates a free market funding model for long-term archives. Anyone can participate with no barriers!
• Bookmark.org archives can be supported with integrated lightning donations. This creates an economic incentive.
• Supporting an archive signals to Bookmark.org to preserve the archive for a longer period of time. Money is a neutral signal for value.

🌐 Pioneering a new way to earn online

Users who create archives are rewarded with Lightning ⚡ donations. This incentivizes users to create high quality archives, and share them widely.

Bookmark.org makes 100% of the donation available to the recipient without taking a fee. This opportunity is accessible to anyone, globally.

If you are old enough to remember the turn of the millennium, then you remember a time when the internet was a much simpler place.

Bookmark is bringing that internet back, and we invite you to be part of the mission. Instead of an internet controlled by a tiny handful of corporations, we will build alternative infrastructure to disrupt the power dynamic. We will empower our own users to have more control over their own data and digital assets.

We believe that in order to do this, we need to rebuild the entire infrastructure stack. It might sound strange to start such a mission with building an archiving service, but consider how we are actually building out from the core: media and payments.

As we develop out our long-term roadmap, all of our future plans will depend on the core infrastructure that we are building now.

How it works

Basic link archiving is launched and live on bookmark.org right now.

Bookmark.org creates archives on independent infrastructure with a permanent URL like https://bookmark.org/archive/1234

👾 Link rot is our enemy

Link rot is what happens when a link no longer points to the same resource – maybe it was deleted, changed, or no longer accessible. This happens all the time on the internet, and it can be a real problem.

Digital archives backed by ⚡ Lightning

• Web Archives: Our current release includes support for web archives and works well on traditional web content (HTML, CSS, images). Future releases will include improved archive quality (fidelity), improved crawling, indexing, and retrieval capabilities, archive scheduling, bulk archives,  and private archives.

• Social Media Archives: Currently supported platforms include LinkedIn posts, Youtube channels, Wikipedia articles, Substack articles, WordPress blog posts, and more. Support is currently limited for some closed and proprietary social media platforms.
• Audio and Video Archives: Audio and video is not currently archived. Future releases will include support for extracting, storing, and serving archived audio and video.

Micropayments

• Bitcoin Lightning Wallet: Users receive an integrated bitcoin lightning wallet for making micro-transactions. Users can make deposits to the wallet. Users can use the wallet to donate to other users. Users can use the wallet to receive donations from other users and from the public.

• Donations: When a user clicks one of the donation amounts, they are prompted to confirm the payment, and the payment is made from the integrated wallet. Future releases will include the ability to pay from an external wallet.

• Deposits: Users can make additional deposits from any lightning wallet to their Bookmark wallet.

• BOLT-11 invoices: Users pay a BOLT-11 to execute the deposit

Future releases will also include the ability to withdraw.

Profiles

• Profiles: User profile pages currently display a simple list of archives created by that user. Future releases to include profile picture, etc. Users are designated using an @ symbol, e.g. https://bookmark.org/@user

The future

Collections

• Collections and pages: Our roadmap includes the ability to group archives into logical sets, or collections. Users can publish pages that contain any number of collections. These pages, curated by an expert user, can become authoritative sources of information in all manner of subjects.

Search

• Search and discovery: Our roadmap also includes content discovery features, including categorization, tagging, and full-text indexing and search.

Media & Commerce

• Digital products: Bookmark will enable users to monetize digital content in new ways. In addition to donations, users will be able to directly monetize  via premium content, subscriptions, and streaming money.

The opportunity

Bookmark has an opportunity to disrupt and establish new segments in several related industries:

The digital media industry

• Paid media: ~$104B US, ~$67B China, ~$53B Europe
• Ads: ~$616B worldwide

The payments industry

• Microtransactions: ~$70B worldwide

The archiving industry

• Enterprise: ~$7B
• Non-profit: ~$2B
• Government: ~$1.4B  (National Archives digital archives)
• Academic: ~$1B (estimate)

We will bring alternatives and a bitcoin standard to these industries. We see opportunities to create value in a wide variety of B2B and B2C applications. Web archiving is just the beginning!

The Team

Joe Davison, Product and Engineering

Leon Siegmund, Marketing

How you can help

• Try it yourself: Our alpha is now live at bookmark.org.

To start, try archiving news articles, how-to guides, reference information, essays, and blog posts you find useful.

How you can help, continued

• Help us test: Reach out to us on telegram to become a tester. Anyone can do this and your feedback is really valuable to us.
• Join our team: We are recruiting engineers. The major components of our tech stack are Elixir, Phoenix Framework, Postgres, LNbits and Archivebox on Amazon EC2 (Ubuntu), plus minimal front-end JS, CSS, and HTML. (PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript developers: Don’t worry, Elixir is fun and you can become productive very quickly. Reach out and let us introduce you to our code base!)
• Fund us: To date, we have received generous infrastructure donations from Amazon, Linode, and Digital Ocean that can sustain us for at least the next 12 months. We are currently looking for more storage, compute, and bandwidth donations, as well as help with Lightning node and channel management infrastructure. We also need bitcoin and cash to fund ongoing development. If you are forward thinking investor, donor, or benefactor, reach out.

We are proud to be entrants in this year’s BOLT🔩FUN Legends of Lightning ⚡️ tournament. We are grateful for the generosity of Fulgur Ventures and the African Bitcoin Conference in sponsoring the event. Please support our project in the hackathon and beyond.

Yours truly,

the Bookmark.org team