How to Add Private Notes to Your X (Twitter) and Bluesky Bookmarks
Published by
X (Twitter) does not let you add a note to a bookmark. Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr don't either. You can save a post, but you can't write down why you saved it. In Birdfeeder, every bookmark has a private notes field for exactly that.
Why I wanted notes on bookmarks
I kept running into the same problem while testing the relaunch. I'd open a bookmark from three months back and have no idea why I saved it. The post was fine on its own, but the reason I hit the bookmark button was already gone from my head.
A short note fixes that. Something like "the pgvector config he mentions here is what I want to try" or "check if this still applies after the Rails 8 upgrade" is enough to bring the context back.
How bookmark notes work in Birdfeeder
Each bookmark gets one text box. The note is attached to your bookmark, not to the post it points to, and it stays there for as long as the bookmark exists. It works the same for bookmarks from X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr.
When you search your bookmarks, the note shows up right under the post in the results. So when you find a saved post again, the reason you saved it is right there with it. Search itself matches the text of the post and the author's handle, so it helps to search for something the post says and let the note remind you why it mattered.
Bookmarks with a note also get a higher chance of showing up in the "From your archive" picks on the dashboard and at the end of the weekly email. If you took the time to write something down, the post was probably worth seeing again.
Who can see my notes?
Nobody except you. Notes are private, even if you make the bookmark itself public on your Birdfeeder profile. A public bookmark shows the post. The note stays hidden.
That makes notes the opposite of public bookmarks. Public bookmarks are for choosing which saved posts other people can see. Notes are for explaining something to yourself later.
More on the feature page: Bookmark Notes.