Tabbed browsers have confined us internet users to a reduced representation of our engagement with content online. We are bound to a linear, sequential history with tabs when what we're doing on the internet much better resembles a journey through a sea of information.
This is best evidenced when we go down rabbitholes on the internet. We all know how it goes, most recently I was reading about Mexico for a potential trip and the next thing I know I'm deep in the weeds of Nahuatl weaponry (looks like this btw). It's such a well established concept that there's even a game about it.
There are several tools and approaches out there for this, even a bunch on Atproto. Notably, Semble allows us to curate and share collections of urls, and recently added the ability to connect different concepts. We also have Margin, which allows us to annotate pages on the internet, and highlight parts of it, making pages on the internet have a little bit more familiarity as we come across annotations in the wild. And more directly relevant is Sidetrail, which is an app that allows you to curate and create trails that others can go down.
I'm throwing my hat in the ring with the Rabbithole extension, which I'm proud to announce has no new lexicons! The extension combines aspects of the aforementioned, and allows users to track their rabbitholes with the following features:
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a Rabbithole view, which are basically Pinterest boards but for websites. You can grab websites in the wild that matches a category and put them in there. I commandeered the new tab page for this as I haven't found a single person (on a major browser) that cares about it.
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an easy overlay that allows you to store websites with important knowledge as soon as you encounter them. It's designed to be minimally invasive, and if you hate it you can just hide it and add websites with the popup. You can use it to add to an existing rabbithole or create a new one on the fly
My Rabbithole overlay as I'm writing this article, with my Rabbithole rabbithole active
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within rabbitholes, you can create organized collections like Burrows, which are actually just Semble collections, you can even publish them to Semble if you're signed in with your internet handle
A burrow I made from the trust and safety unconforence at Atmosphere conf. You can find it on Semble here.
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you can also create Trails from a rabbithole for others to go down, these can act as tutorials for skills or concepts
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you can also discover trails/burrows created by other people
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finally, you can use Cmd+K to search across all your collections. You can finally scratch that itch of finding that pesky thing that you searched up months ago!
Privacy
Everything you create is stored on your browser's IndexedDB. Obviously your web search history is extremely private and nothing leaves your device, unless you publish it. When you do publish burrows or trails, you choose exactly what you share to the Atmosphere. I really want to be able to sync across devices but we gotta wait for all this cool stuff to become real.
Coming soon
The extension currently only supports Chromium but requires just a tiny bit of effort to work on Firefox.
Interop with Margin, I want users to be able to publish annotations
AI summaries for rabbitholes, and maybe using agents to automatically create your rabbitholes. Chromium has a neat experimental SDK for this, and I need to see how far I can push it.
Coming not so soon
A more visual display of Rabbitholes. I like how Horse Browser does this, but we can probably make it even more visual. Maybe something that resembles a game like Anisota? Hit me up if you have ideas!
Collaborative, community curated trails are definitely on the map as I envision Rabbithole to eventually become more of a quirky education platform!
This is an alpha!!
There are definitely a bunch of bugs, I wanted to get this out in time for Atmosphere conference in an acceptable state. Bug reports and contributions are welcome! And feel free to DM me on Bluesky for feedback and ideas!