As rumors of delicio.us shutdown rumbled through the internet, a bunch of geeks in a minor IRC channel started gabbing. They has a lot of info, links, tags, and data stored in delico.us, and were afraid to lose them, syncing, and all other good features. They realized as geeks often do, that if we owned the service, we wouldn’t have to worry about outside shutdowns if we had our own service. Thus hypatia spun-up Federated Bookmarks
The first output of this crew is something called gitmarks, based on work by Hillary Mason (of bit.ly). This is a little tool to store bookmarks, bookmark metadata, and page content locally for searching, using, and peer-to-peer sharing. Since it is based on git this system can use a central server, *or* it can share peer to peer. As the name implies, it uses a git backed for data transfer and versioning. It also has the ability to pull down content for a local cache, and for local searching.
This project is in Alpha, and if you want to test the silly thing, the basics work. If you want to help build a cool distributed tool, we could use some help! We need to building a server, building more git tools, xmmp messaging, and browser integration. We also hope to create tools that along the way that make it easy to build systems for Moglen Boxen. Ping FarMcKon@gmail.com, leave a comment here, or hit #hive76 in IRC if you want to help.