diigo unreliable - migrate to Zotero? Hypothesis?

[dckc]

6 March 2026: Diigo is down and it's not clear that they're coming back.

some goals:

• syndicate diigo bookmarks on madmode.com #243
• migrate to another service
  • preserve creation date
    • migrate/copy into zotero
  • preserve reverse links, i.e. seeing bookmarks on pages as you browse

---

Hypothesis UI isn't as clean as diigo - takes lots more guestures to tag a page. And the on/off status is kinda odd... I'm not really interested in other people's annotations most of the time. self-hosted? sandstorm? nearlyfreespeech?

Jon Udell
W3C Annotations spec - ocap style?

#indieweb

---

older:

over quota since <= Nov 24, 2016

[dckc]

dec 21: search by tag was down

https://twitter.com/dckc/status/1737753173484290443

seems to be ok today

[dckc]

diigo has been flakey a few times lately

[dckc]

Zotero, Diigo, and Hypothesis: annotation, archiving, tagging

In a Zotero 7 blog item, I learned it does webpage snapshots. Nice! Cached Pages (Webpage Backup) is one of the main features that keeps me paying for Diigo premium. As noted above, Diigo search flakes out at an alarming rate. Zotero is a mature organization.

Could Zotero subsume my Diigo usage entirely? Unfortunately, no; the bookmarking / annotation UX is just too klunky for something that I use many times a day, and it's missing support for reverse links:

Workflow	Diigo	Zotero
1. Bookmarking	1. Click Diigo extension. 2. A popup appears to add tags and save.	1. Click Zotero extension to save a snapshot. 2. Open Zotero desktop app to add tags and organize.
2. Annotation	1. Select text. menu appears 2. Choose highlight	1. Click Zotero extension to save a snapshot. 2. Go to desktop app 3. open the snapshot, 4. ...
3. Search	1. Click Diigo extension. 2. Open library 3. Enter search terms. 4. anxiously hope it works	1. Open Zotero library in web site or desktop app. 2. Enter search terms. 3. Results appear instantly as I type.
3. Reverse links	automatic. Diigo extension lights up on bookmarked pages. Annotations show up in-context.	no notification that the current page is bookmarked in Zotero

Despite the nice support for annotation standards in Hypothesis, I have yet to get past the kicking-the-tires stage with it.

Meanwhile, since archiving is what brought on this recent episode, we should look at my archive.org usage too:

Workflow	Diigo	Zotero	Hypothesis	Archive.org
1. Bookmarking with Tags	Delightful	Rich, though heavier UX	Good?	Rich, but even heavier. Creating an item can take minutes
2. Annotation	Delightful 2 gestures	Rich, though heavier UX	Good?	no
3. Searching	Declining Reliability.	Excellent once the library is open	Good?	Fair. Search is for public archives and is not personalized.
4. Archival Access	haven't tried it much	Excellent. PDF and web page snapshots	Poor. Relies on the live webpage to be available.	Excellent. for now.

For both personal knowledge capture and archival access, Governance / Stability is important:

Diigo	Zotero	Hypothesis	Archive.org
Commercial, Private. Blog is offline. Last substantial update was March 2018. Peaked at #13 in a 2011 "Top Tools for Learning" list but not ranked as of 2023, 2024.	Non-profit, User-funded. small, paid dev team and a long history of active development. Transitioned from grant funded to user-funded some time before 2020	Non-profit, Grant-funded.	Non-profit, Grant-funded. The centralized governance model and the threat of legal challenges (e.g., from publishers) introduce a level of risk to long-term public access.

Zotero Governance

About Zotero
Zotero is a project of Digital Scholar. It was created at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
-- credits_and_acknowledgments [Zotero Documentation]

Handy:

• Corporation for Digital Scholarship – Bylaws

Diigo UX backed by Zotero storage?

I have already scripted a tool to export my Diigo history to JSON. Can Zotero's SQLite schema subsume the Diigo JSON format? It has two main parts: item metadata (URL, tags, title) and a nested annotations array.

1. Metadata: A Straightforward Mapping

This part is a simple data transformation exercise. Zotero's relational database has clear tables for this data, and Diigo JSON maps cleanly to it.

• Diigo JSON: url, title, tags, and timestamps (created_at).
• Zotero SQLite:
  • items table: for the core "Web Page" item type.
  • itemData and itemDataValues: for the URL.
  • itemTags and tags: for a proper relational representation of the tags.
  • dateAdded and dateModified: for the timestamps.

2. Annotations: Content vs. Position

The Diigo JSON format for annotations is structured as a simple array of objects. Each object has content (the highlighted text) and comments. The critical missing piece is any positional data—there are no coordinates, no character offsets, nothing that says where on the page the highlight was.

Zotero's annotation system is built around a local, archived HTML file (the "snapshot"). The annotations in Zotero's database are linked to a specific position within that file. Without the positional data from Diigo, re-creating the highlights in Zotero's reader isn't straightforward.

[dckc]

Obsidian Web Clipper looks like a contender!

I don't see support for importing highlights, but the source is open (MIT license).

Highlighting isn't as convenient as diigo, but then: sometimes having the diigo widget pop up every time I select text is annoying.

[dckc]

diigo.com cert problem?

Your connection is not private

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from www.diigo.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more about this warning

NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

Hide advanced Back to safety

This server could not prove that it is www.diigo.com; its security certificate is from 10ainmobiliaria.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.

Domain Suspended by ZoneEdit

TXT diigo.com "This domain has been suspended"

I reported this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Diigo#Domain_suspended

[dckc]

made a backup

• diigo-bookmarks.ndjson: 16117
• diigo-bookmarks-shared.ndjson: 14269

curl -fsS --resolve secure.diigo.com:443:54.148.192.94 \
    --user "$DIIGO_USERNAME:$PASSWORD" \
"https://secure.diigo.com/api/v2/bookmarks?user=$DIIGO_USERNAME&sort=2&filter=all&start=${start}&count=${count}&key=$DIIGO_API_KEY"

$ sha256sum diigo-bookmarks.ndjson diigo-bookmarks-shared.ndjson 
03d1b64e62a3fe71bad116b742ef60cf82bfeec663b8220a1fceba152796ab9a  diigo-bookmarks.ndjson
a9f55d843ec8bfddfc54c54a19336311101069cac489e210611276ad10a3a65a  diigo-bookmarks-shared.ndjson

[dckc]

Migrate to Raindrop?

Raindrop.io — All-in-one bookmark manager

ack: Matt Fahrner 3:19 PM · Mar 7, 2026

[dckc]

Domain outage resolved

reported in #245 (comment)

See also diigo.com Domain Information | Cloudflare Radar

[dckc]

Diigo down? emergency cut-over?

Making a new bookmark / highlight is failing.

The other day I couldn't make a back-up via the API. May 29 Email to support goes unanswered.
Fortunately, the RSS export format seems pretty rich. Here's hoping one more export captures my last few bookmarks.

Hypothesis requires a comment?

I can't seem to just

• highlight and post, without writing a comment

Does Hypothesis support

• private bookmarks / annotations?

Obsidian web clipper

It works for capture, but I don't have

• a publishing pipeline. And
• it doesn't do back-links.

[dckc]

It worked today. Time to try a backup via API?
Or another RSS backup?

---

p.s. I found my python3 porting work. Running python2 is discouraged to a remarkable degree!

• Improve Diigo backup reliability and port to Python 3 #242