Litter Layer - Indie search and social bookmarking federation.

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Litter Layer started out as search only. Now there is a federated portion and social bookmarking with commenting. Users can even customize a public bookmarks page with CSS. Privacy and 100% control over your account is a priority. Setting up a node is easy and works even with cheap shared hosting, and comes with a search widget for your site. Bookmark search results, or add any bookmarks you want and they'll be added to the search engine. Create a fun avatar (cartoon or shapes).

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The goal is to add some vibrancy and fun back to the web by creating a search engine largely built by humans. There is automated crawling, but I don't let it run wild (yet) due to infrastructure/cost. With support, we could index enough pages for the search to be useful. But, search aside, it's a great, minimal way to save bookmarks. Optionally, share your bookmarks with the public and others can leave comments. Know some CSS? Make your bookmarks pages look however you want.

been looking for something like this for ages. the bookmarks feel familiar and the patu spider angle is delightfully weird. excited to see the index grow.

How do you keep the index from getting spammed with junk bookmarks, and is there any moderation layer or trust system in place for what nodes contribute?

 What’s a junk bookmark? As long as it’s a working webpage it’s kept in the index. If it’s a broken webpage it’s either removed immediately or eventually. Nodes are manually reviewed and approved first.

Curious how you handle duplicates when lots of users bookmark the same niche indie sites, and whether there's any ranking signal beyond raw bookmark count so the results don't feel like a popularity contest.

 If the webpage already exists in the search index it won’t be added to the search index again. Bookmark count isn’t used; the search rankings aren’t based on any sort of popularity. Although, that’s actually not a bad idea as an extra feature. Do a regular search, or, search by popularity/trending. I might add that in the future.