Comment by sprior

I depended heavily on Pocket for over a decade as a free user. It started to get bogged down with about 20k bookmarks. I used to spend hours manually tagging saves and the search function never seemed to actually return results. This time around I wanted a self hosted solution.

I looked at Walabag and Shiori before I decided on Karakeep. I just didn't like the UI of the first two. I already have an Ollama server and the AI tagging feature of Karakeep is far better than Walabag's, in fact the tag management feature in general is. And Meilisearch adds a really fast search engine to Karakeep that has allowed me to discover new value to the 16k bookmarks from Pocket after cleaning down from the 20k I exported, it's super impressive.

Now the less great news, Karakeep is much newer and less mature than the other options and currently only supports a SQLite backend and I really hope that changes. The only API for Karakeep goes through its web interface and so I don't think I even could export all my bookmarks. If the data was stored in a standalone real database like MySQL or PostgreSQL other options would be possible.

The AI tagging is AMAZING but it generates a LOT of tags and that makes the tag management screens in Karakeep difficult or impossible to use because they are overwhelmed. I am looking forward to the next and future releases which aim to help with this.

I use the Android app which works really well.

Karakeep does make your server into a web crawler and because of the little war on AI LLMs we're experiencing these days an unfortunate number of websites have started to fight all crawling. Karakeep uses a SingleFile browser extension which allows you to prove you are a human or log in to a website and then capture a page and submit it to Karakeep. This is a little awkward because you may end up bookmarking something once using the regular Karakeep extension and then see that you didn't get what you want and have to do it again via SingleFile. I'm hoping that at least a config list will be added so that the regular Karakaap browser extension will automatically invoke SingleFile for websites known to block bots.