asciimoo

We have a `yt-dlp` based extractor that can fetch the subtitles/transcripts from the sites `yt-dlp` supports: https://hister.org/docs/extractors#ytdlp

I've never experienced/heard similar behavior. Could you open a GitHub issue or join our Discord/IRC to identify the root cause?

Exactly, this is the biggest advantage of the extension. It is fully invisible for the websites, so no captcha, anti-bot protection, no authentication issues, every common bottleneck of a classic crawler is solved by the browser/user.

Yes, that's something I'd like to support. The main missing piece for a user-friendly hosting option such as PikaPods is a configuration UI. At the moment, customizing Hister requires editing a configuration file, which isn't practical for this kind of hosted service.

The extension captures the content of the opened tabs, it does not create new requests. If you open both, it captures both.

This is a great suggestion, thanks! I'll definitely add it to the list of candidates. My plan is to do a vote on our social platforms if we have a few decent candidates.

The default interface is web based: https://demo.hister.org/

Notes are not supported yet, only labels. But it is a useful addition, added to my TODO.

Yes: https://hister.org/posts/how-hister-makes-the-social-web-sea...

The main difference I see is Hister focuses on creating an active knowledge base and finding information quickly, while ArchiveBox focuses on preserving web content for the long term.

Sure, as long as you (and the browser extension) can reach the server, it can be used from as many machines as you want even in a multi-user setup.

Unfortunately, it is still considered too similar from a legal standpoint.

Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A. My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach.

Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline result previews, so information remains searchable even when the original page changes or disappears. It supports full text and semantic search, can run entirely on your own machine, and includes a web interface, command line tools, and an MCP endpoint for assistant integrations.

Website: https://hister.org/

Tiny read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/

Ps.: It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. The owner of the other project has asked us to change it, so we’ll probably need to comply sooner or later.

Name suggestions are welcome! Ideally, the new name should be relatively short, sound good, and have an available .org domain.

Thanks!

The name is coming from "HISTory on STERoids". When I checked the name, I found only a beetle and part of the Danube called "Hister".

The extracted content is stored and displayed as HTML, so converting it to markdown doesn't guarantee lossless transformation. But, the other direction works well: Hister can live track and import markdown files providing full text search and rendered previews for all your files.

EDIT: I wanted to write "*not* sure" in the previous message.

You can create multiple users for different use-cases. Also, it is possible to automatically assign labels to documents coming from different sources and use these labels to filter results. E.g. using multiple browser profiles where different profiles apply different labels to submitted documents.

> Would Hister be suitable for this?

The indexer it uses (Bleve) can handle millions of records according to their docs, but sure that Hister would be the best choice for this task. I'd probably use Meilisearch (https://www.meilisearch.com/).

> Can it index mbox files?

Not yet.

> Does it have a search API so I can build an MCP server?

It has both search API and MCP server endpoints.

The whole design is created by a main contributor and IIRC the style is called neobrutalism.

It depends on what you consider intense browsing. An indexed document uses about 100KB on average because Hister stores the full original HTML for offline previews. If storage is a concern, you can disable offline previews, reducing the average document size significantly.

The name coming from HISTory on STERoids. When I checked the name I found only a beetle and part of the Danube called "Hister".

Doh, sorry, the answer was coming from me who did not read the question properly. It currently cannot import browser bookmarks, but it is a good idea. Added to my TODO.

> I assume it content-extracts that on upload?

Hister always stores the original material.

> That way you could also switch from an extracted view to a "full" view in the UI.

It isn't even needed, we just need a SingleFile specific extractor (an interface in Hister to parse specific page content and provide custom previews) that provides the full original HTML for the preview panel.

> Hopefully I'll find time to contribute!

I'd appreciate it. <3

Yes, it can import data from various sources, including browser history, and popular self-hosted bookmarking apps: https://hister.org/docs/import

You can host Hister on a home server and access it from multiple devices.

Automatic page capture on mobile currently requires Firefox, since mobile Chrome does not support browser extensions.

Wow, this is a really inspiring use case and blog post. Thanks for sharing it.

What tools or features would Hister need to support your complete search workflow?

That is a great combo. My main friction with it is having to manually capture pages I want to keep.

The default configuration binds only to localhost, and a fresh installation starts with an empty database/index. Could you clarify which specific attack surface you are concerned about in that scenario?

Safari support is currently stalled in this PR: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/pull/46. I do not have access to macOS, so help with development and testing would be very welcome.

What do you mean by integration? Hister already supports importing data from Karakeep, Linkding, Linkwarden, Readeck, Shaarli, and wallabag: https://hister.org/docs/import

Exactly! I had the very same issues before Hister.

> One question if ya don't mind, while I explore: any chance of singlefile support?

Yes, partially. Hister can already import HTML files created by SingleFile, but there is no direct integration yet. In the longer term, I would like the SingleFile extension to be able to send snapshots directly to Hister.