One Bookmark Archive for X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr: Why I Built It This Way
Published by
The first version of Birdfeeder did one thing: it saved your X bookmarks so you could find them again. I launched it in 2022, and it worked fine until X changed its API pricing in early 2023. Reading a user's own bookmarks through the official API got so expensive that the numbers stopped working, and I shut it down.
In July 2026 I relaunched it. This time it isn't only X. Bookmarks from Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr all go into the same archive.
How the X costs work now
X didn't get cheaper. What changed is that most of what Birdfeeder does doesn't need X's official API.
Reading your own bookmarks still has to go through X's official API with your login. There's no way around that. But filling in details about other people, like the profiles of the accounts whose posts you bookmarked, doesn't need your login at all. For that I use twitterapi.io, a third-party API that costs far less per request than X's own endpoints for this kind of read.
So the split is: X's official API for your own data, the cheaper API for everything else. That split is what made the relaunch possible.
Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr don't charge for reads. That's why Birdfeeder imports your whole bookmark history from those networks right away and checks for new bookmarks every 30 minutes, while X is checked every 8 hours and the full X history import is part of the yearly plan.
One account, several networks
The bigger decision was about accounts. I didn't want Birdfeeder to be four separate products behind one login page.
One Birdfeeder account can hold several network accounts at once. You sign up with X, Bluesky or Mastodon, then link the others in Settings. Everything lands in one archive with one search, no matter where you bookmarked it. If you read Bluesky in the morning and X at night, you shouldn't have to remember which app to search in later. I tested that on myself when I moved most of my reading from X to Bluesky.
Why Nostr works differently
Nostr has no OAuth, so there is no "log in with Nostr" button to build. You sign up with one of the other three networks first, then paste your npub (your public key) into Settings. Birdfeeder reads your public bookmark list from a few relays. It never asks for your nsec (your private key) and never stores one. More in Nostr bookmark backup without a private key.
The same features for every network
Once a bookmark is saved, the network it came from doesn't matter. Every network gets full-text search, the weekly email, private notes, public sharing of single bookmarks, an RSS and JSON feed, and MCP access so an AI assistant can search your archive. I built the features to work for any network from the start, so Bluesky bookmarks aren't an extra bolted onto an X product.
The whole thing is a bet that people already read across several networks, and that their bookmark tool should work the same way. If you want to compare it with other bookmark tools, there is a comparison page.