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| A Week with Hypothes.is | 2022-11-26T19:01:00Z | Getting started with and used to the popular web annotation service. | /2022/11/26/one-week-with-hypothesis | post |
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Why I Like Hypothes.is
Many folks who have been hanging around on the IndieWeb scene may already be familiar with hypothes.is, a web annotation tool that allows you to highlight and make notes on web pages and PDFs directly, in-browser. Historically I've had accidental interactions with it when I'd loaded up blogs (like Tom Zylstra's for example) and I've also seen Chris Aldrich wax lyrical about the service a lot (he is a hypothes.is power user, and he's made so many annotations there that they recently sent him a little care package in celebration).
The thing that's really appealing about the service is that you can just install the Chrome Plugin or Unofficial Firefox Plugin and just start annotating whatever you're looking at. Using it is as satisfying as taking a paper printout of an academic paper and going to town with my fountain pen and the results are a lot more legible and leaves a public learning exhaust for others to examine. I find using the hypothes.is annotator is lower friction than using the Joplin or Evernote web clippers to make copies of documents and skulking off to add markdown highlights and comments in your own private note repo and I prefer to write in public anyway, it helps me hold myself accountable. Plus the tool works on PDFs without the need for a separate PDF reader.
The other cool thing about hypothes.is is the social aspect: if you make public comments then other people who land on the same page as you and open the annotation tool can see what you wrote and even respond to you. This can be a really cool way to interact and learn together (although I can totally see how people might end up getting into flame wars too - with great annotation power comes great responsibility guys).
What if hypothes.is do a runner with all your data?
Early doors I had a lot of concerns about this too. After all we've all been burned by "big tech" harvesting our data. Hypothes.is is a non-profit that was