Why Every Bookmark Now Has a Notes Field

I kept running into the same thing while testing the relaunch: I'd open a bookmark from three months back and have no idea why I'd saved it. The tweet or the Bluesky post was fine on its own, but whatever context made me hit the bookmark button in the first place was already gone from my head.

So bookmarks in Birdfeeder now have a notes field. One text box, entirely private, attached to the bookmark itself rather than to the post it points to. Write "the pgvector config he mentions here is what I want to try" or "check if this still applies after the Rails 8 upgrade" and it sits there next to the bookmark for as long as the bookmark exists.

The part I didn't want to get wrong was search. A note is useless if it's just decoration on a detail page you never revisit. Birdfeeder already runs full-text search across the text of everything you've bookmarked, so notes go into that same index. Search for "pgvector" and you get back both the posts that mention it and the bookmarks where you wrote it into a note yourself. One search box, no separate "search my notes" mode to remember.

It's deliberately the opposite of the public bookmarks feature. Public bookmarks are about deciding which saved posts you want to show off on your profile. Notes are the other direction entirely, nobody sees them, not even if you make the bookmark itself public. They're for you explaining something to your future self, and future-you is the only reader who'll ever see it.

It works the same regardless of which network the bookmark came from. X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, the notes field doesn't care, since it lives on the bookmark row and not on anything provider-specific.