Totem
Your Twitter bookmarks organized to make you read them
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Totem - Your Twitter bookmarks organized to make you read them

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You bookmark great threads on X and never see them again. Totem turns your new tab into a distraction-free environment for those bookmarks, the way you'd read on Substack. Open a thread full-width, highlight what matters, search everything, export etc.

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Maker
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Hi everyone! I'm Ankit 👋 I have a bad habit: I bookmark brilliant threads on X telling myself I'll "read it later." Later never comes. The bookmarks page is a graveyard, no order, no search, no way to actually read anything longer than a glance. I kept wishing my bookmarks looked like a Substack post. Full width. Clean type. No infinite feed pulling my attention away. Just me and the thing I wanted to read. So I built Totem. It turns your new tab into a quiet reading room for your X bookmarks: - 📖 Read, don't scroll — threads unroll into a clean, full-width article - ✍️ Highlight & annotate — mark the lines worth keeping, like you would in a book. - 🔍 Search everything — find that one thread by a word you remember - 📤 Export — send highlights and threads to your notes (Obsidian, Markdown), full and partial bookmark export - 🌱 A calm browser new tab - new tab becomes an invitation to read something you already chose, instead of doomscrolling. The whole idea: the things you saved should be easy and pleasant to actually read. It's a free Chrome extension. I'd love your honest feedback, especially on the reading experience. What would make you actually return to your bookmarks?

Every one is solving for bookmarks for links, but this seems like first whole-hearted attempt to fix twitter bookmarks once and for all. Speciality softwares like this actually work. I am installing it right away. Thanks for shipping this 🙌

Maker

 Thanks 🙌

You've been one of the earliest to test Totem and your feedback genuinely shaped where it's going. Means a lot.

Congratulations on the launch! I bookmark things all the time and almost never go back to read them. How does Totem decide what to resurface first?

Maker

 Thanks! That's exactly the problem it's built around - bookmarking is the reward and the reading never happens.

Here's what the reading list looks like (screenshot below).

Notice the tabs: Unread 94, Reading 14, Read 1 - the honest state of anyone's bookmarks. Instead of making you stare at 94 unread, the default tab is Today's Read, a small daily queue of ~5.

Totem picks your daily 5 by dropping what you've read, snoozed, or kept ignoring, then scoring the rest based on

  • things you started reading

  • saved recently

  • pinned

  • flagged

  • old bookmarks gathering dust

 Are those 5 selected randomly?

Maker

 We score al the bookmarks based on parameters and like what you are reading, saved recently, pinned, reading time etc and choose the top 5.

Bookmarks-you-never-read is one of those problems where the saving is the reward and the reading never happens, so organizing them only helps if it also changes when they surface.

As someone who's shipped a Chrome extension, the part I'd want to know is what happens on X's side. Reading bookmarks means either scraping the timeline DOM or going through the API, and both have been moving targets — the DOM shifts without notice, and the API tier that covers bookmarks isn't cheap. Which route did you take, and how often has it broken on you? For an open source project that maintenance cost is the thing that decides whether it's still working in a year.

Maker

 This is actually the core of how this extension works.

either scraping the timeline DOM or going through the API

Neither, really - it doesn't scrape the DOM and it doesn't use the paid API. It calls X's internal web GraphQL endpoint (the same Bookmarks request the site itself makes) by reusing your existing login session. Being an extension is what makes this workable.

The one thing that actually moves is the GraphQL query ID, which changes on client bundle deploys. It's not hard-coded - when it changes, the extension discovers the new one (gets the new one from the current JS bundle as a fallback) and retries.

It's held up really well - hasn't broken for me at all.

Oh man, my X bookmarks are a landfill. I save threads at 1am then never see them again. Turning new tab into a calm reading page sounds… doable. Love the highlights + Obsidian export. How’s it handle super long threads or ones with a bunch of media?

Maker

 haha I use the work "graveyard" for the same reason.

It pulls the whole conversation and stitches it into an article-like structure, so it's easy to read top to bottom.

As for media, everything renders inline — GIFs, video, images all work smoothly. You can play videos and click images to enlarge them. We even support code highlighting.

With this tool I just might actually revisit my bookmarked tweets!

Maker

 That was the aim. I wanted to read bookmarked tweets without the distraction of twitter.

awesome! my kinda bad habit too... does it support Obsidian ?

Interesting product. I have gotten into the habit of bookmarking on my browser - both X posts and other to reads - and then going through them once a week. Any plans on expanding this beyond X?

Hi Ankit, does it allow us to search and summarise?