Hello everyone!
TL;DR:
Journiv is a a beautiful, self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights. The mission is simple: your memories should always stay yours. Own them, don’t rent them.
Journiv 0.1.0-beta.4 is now live on GitHub and fully Docker-hostable.
Start owning your thoughts and memories forever and keep them completely private.
The Story Behind Journiv
I got into self-hosting last year and while exploring options journaling solution, I realized there wasn’t a truly modern, self-hosted equivalent to Day One or Apple Journal. Most alternatives were either general note apps or old abandoned projects.
I wanted something focused on journaling with:
- “On This Day” memories
- Prompt-based journaling
- A clean, minimal, distraction-free writing experience
So… I built my own: Journiv, a beautiful (at least I am trying to make it so), self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights.
Get Involved
Give Journiv a try, share your feedback and report issues. It means a lot at this stage.
It looks like this is open-source, but not Free Software, since you’re using PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 as your license. Did you consider other licenses like any of the GPL licenses or BSD-2/3 Clause license, Apache-2.0 or any of the others that fit the Free Software classification?
Journiv is source-available but not “Free Software” under the FSF/OSI definition. I chose the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license intentionally to keep the code open for personal and educational use which allow hosting for non-commercial while preventing “commercial” redistribution or hosting for commercial gain without permission.
My motivation behind Journiv is to give a solution to self hosted people like me and other a journal first experience on par with any major cloud offering so that they don’t have to mold their usage to a notes app and be unsatisfied and frustrated like me. This license enables everyone in the self hosted community to use Journiv.
I did consider permissive and copyleft licenses (Apache, GPL, BSD, etc.), but sustainability is a major concern for this project. I have already spent hundreds of hours on this over last couple of months and there is so much more to build (take a look at the issues page of github repo). I want to keep development open and transparent while ensuring that commercial entities can’t simply repackage and profit from it.
I see where you’re coming from, and can understand why you decided to prevent commercial repackaging and tivoization. Source-available sounds like it’s proprietary, which I assume it’s not.