Using bookmarks on Fediverse
I'm not sure whether folks will find this useful. Twitter didn't have bookmarks when I was using it. It's possible I'm late to the game and everyone except me already knows how to make good use of bookmarks. That said, here's how I'm using bookmarks on Mastodon. It's not “the right way” but you could find it useful.
- Boosting cool things. “What? I thought we were bookmarking?” Fediverse famously doesn't have an algorithm. That means our timelines are clustered by times people are active. If something comes on your feed now, now may be the least effective time to boost it if you want more people to see it. I even use this with my own posts so I can boost them during peak European hours even though I am not awake enough to write them at 6AM my time.
- Remembering stuff you want to read later. I'm kind of guessing this is how most people use it if they're using it already. Worth mentioning though. I tend to research a topic across several tags, bookmarking posts for later. I also use this method with tag games I'm following so I can get to the prompts more easily. I open the post from the bookmark, unbookmark it, and bookmark it again to put it up top for the next day.
- Check replies on a post later. Someone asked a question. A question you want to know the answer(s) to. But they just posted it so there aren't any replies yet. Bookmark it for later! (After boosting it so more people see it and maybe answer the thing.) Bonus: When it comes time to re-read that thread, try opening the original page to see more responses than you would otherwise. Maybe like and boost the answers you liked best while you're at it.
Caveats
At least on Mastodon (and Glitch), your Bookmarks are one big pile. You can quickly get an unmanageable amount posts bookmarked in it. The only thing you can do to organize it is to rebookmark a post to put it at the top of the pile. That's pretty limited in terms of organizational options.
There's an almost magical thing you find if you keep a bookmark for a long time. Older posts from other servers will generally lose their local copy of media over time. On your instance, it could be months. On most instance, it's a much shorter period of time. Depending on the settings your admin has set, bookmarked posts may keep their media for a much longer period of time. This is in the caveat section rather than the features section, though. If you really need to save something long term, you need to do it somewhere other than your bookmarks. The bookmarked copy is illusory. The original post may no longer exist. Whether it exists or not, you may have trouble interacting with it.
You might have noticed that you can export your bookmarks. You should probably regularly export your Archive, Follows and Followers, Lists, Mutes and Blocks, Domain Blocks, and Bookmarks. However, most of these exports provide very minimal information. In the case of bookmarks, each bookmark is just a single address. This is a little worse than it sounds at first because the only context you have is the address for the post itself and the order that the bookmark appears in your list of bookmarks. My previous Fediverse account had over a thousand bookmarks. If I had to find anything in that list, I would have very little information to go on.
How to
This covers the web interface (sometimes known as the “desktop” interface) for vanilla Mastodon as well as Glitch and probably Hometown. If you're using different Fediverse software (or you're using another interface to connect to your Fediverse software), you'll need to check their documentation instead.
If you only have one column visible, you may want to enable the advanced web interface. To do this, open your Mastodon settings, go to Appearance and check the box for Enable advanced web interface.
Each post on Mastodon (etc.) has a bookmark button. This screenshot shows it selected for a post.
Once you have some bookmarks applied, you can find them in the Bookmarks section of your Getting Started pane.
