Reader by Readwise as my link-saving eveything app

Every week I save dozens of links - articles, funny YouTube videos, Bluesky posts, Instagram videos. The only thing there's more of than links I save is apps that promise to organize all these links.

And I've tried many of them - Raindrop.io, Instapaper, Pocket, MyMind, KeepIt...just to name a few. And then I grew tired of these (and their subscriptions) and started dumping everything into a folder in Apple Notes, which was OKAYish, but made it difficult to find things when I went looking for them.

I recently tried Albo, an app that takes your saved links and organizes them into collections. Kind of cool, but I really didn't want yet another subscription and place to save things. Because despite talking a big game about ditching Readwise Reader at the beginning of the year, I went crawling back to it because it is still the best for saving and reading articles and PDFs (and I discovered I was eligible for a 50% price reduction on their annual plan). And one I connected Readwise to Claude, there was kind of no going back because that is so helpful.

And this got me thinking - could Reader by Readwise be my all-encompassing link-saving app?

I started dumping everything into Reader that I wanted to save - YouTube Videos, NY Times articles, Instagram posts, podcast episodes, Apple News articles, PDFs. Some of this content is obviously intended to be read, and Reader is still really good for reading and highlighting written content. But I've also found it does a decent job of saving non-readable things like Instagram posts, YouTube videos, and Bluesky threads. While it doesn't parse these items in any way, it does identify their source, the original link, and enough details to make it so that a search in either Reader or Claude can surface content.

So far, this set up is working. I have one place where all the links I want to save can go (whether or not they are to be read). Anything that I just for saving goes straight into the archive folder.

The search function in Reader is really good, and I have rarely had trouble using it to find something I had archived (including Instagram posts, which it does not technically categorize). However, the real power is the ability to connect Readwise to Claude. This integration makes it possible to find and summarize multiple articles.

I connected Readwise to Claude and often use Claude to surface content. I find it does a better job than the Reader search function, especially if I can't remember exact details about something. While I wish it gave the option to view and organize saved content in a bit more anesthetic manner, it really helps to have all the things saved in one place. One limitation is that Claude cannot search for Instagram videos that I've saved in Readwise, but that doesn't seem to matter since it's pretty easy to find those within Reader itself.

We will see how this set up works. I fully acknowledge it might cause Reader to once again become a black hole, but I guess that will be up to me and how diligent I am about keeping it tidy.