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How do you capture things quickly across devices in a self-hosted setup? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I’ve been struggling with something that sounds simple but is surprisingly annoying:

capturing content quickly across devices in a self-hosted environment.

On Android there’s share, on iOS shortcuts, on desktop copy/paste… but everything feels fragmented.

I often end up losing things or postponing them just because capturing isn’t frictionless.

Curious how others handle this.

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[–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

Yeah that makes sense — treating a folder as the universal entry point is a clever way to unify things.

I think that’s exactly the direction: trying to reduce everything to a single “drop zone”.

Where I personally kept feeling friction is that you still need something in between to get things into that folder (scripts, gestures, automations, etc.).

So the entry point becomes “save to this folder”, but the way you get there still depends on context.

That’s the part I always found hard to make truly uniform.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Let's try this a different way...

    How do you want to indicate something should be retained? What is the single, physical act you want to perform to tell the operating system "this thing needs to be captured"?

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago

    That’s a really good way to frame it.

    I kept coming back to the idea that the “act” shouldn’t be something new you have to learn — it should reuse what you’re already doing in each context.

    So instead of one single physical gesture, it’s more like a single intent expressed through different native actions:

    • on mobile → share
    • on desktop → paste
    • in browser → bookmarklet
    • sometimes even just typing something and sending it

    The key (for me) wasn’t forcing one gesture, but making all of those feel like the same action underneath.

    So the mental model becomes: “this goes into my inbox”, regardless of how I triggered it.

    That’s where things started to click for me.

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